Canon P-150

Business trips, field work and meetings away from the office can all sabotaged by a lack of the essential equipment, particularly when it comes to printing and scanning. Canon's Imageformula P-150 sets out to solve one of those problems.

This is a portable scanner that can be folded down to just 42 x 282 x 98mm. Despite its remarkably small size, the P-150 is a fully-functional duplex sheet-fed document scanner, capable of the batch scanning up to 20 sheets at a time.

Its folding design is an ingenious. A rear paper feed unclips and hinges up and out from the scanner's brick-link folded state. Guides fold out from the tray itself to support paper of any height and width up to A4. The main body of the scanner also hinges open to allow access to the feed roller and separation pad, which ensure the seamless feeding of scanned documents. These are consumable parts. You'll be prompted to replace the roller after 100,000 sheets have been scanned and the separation pad is good for 10,000 pages.

A4 pages were fed smoothly, without any of issues with alignment, skewing, creasing or paper jams that we've seen from some sheet-feed scanners. For optimal scan speeds the P-150 requires two free USB ports - one for data, and one for power, although it can run off a single USB port. A mains adaptor is also available.

It's very quick - we scanned 10 duplex pages in just one minute, three seconds at the scanner's default 200dpi. At P-150's maximum resolution of 600dpi, everything moves a bit more slowly: 10 single-sided full colour pages were scanned in seven minutes and 39 seconds. A single page 600dpi scan took 50 seconds. While this compares well to a typical flatbed, it's significantly slower than most office sheet-fed scanners. The same page scanned in just eight seconds at 200dpi and 11 seconds at 300dpi.

Scan quality at 600dpi was excellent, with sharp text and accurate reproduction of colour and shading. Lettering scanned at the default 200dpi setting was rather fuzzy around the edges, which made reading large blocks of the scanned text on screen into a rather dizzying experience. However, everything was present and legible, particularly when printed out, so 200dpi is enough to do the job for archival purposes. That said, we preferred the appearance of 300dpi text, which was sharper and more solid, and takes just a few seconds longer to scan per page.