CanoScan® LiDE 25 Review - What's in the Box?

The above picture is of the package. When I opened it, I was automatically on my way to taking out the unit and examining it. At first, I was shocked because it was very light. It looked so nice and neat. Then I took out the other components included in the package. Check out the following picture:

Let's enumerate the items which were in the package: the CanoScan LiDE 25, 2 CDs, USB cable, and more than a few sheets of paper. You may wonder why there are two CDs in the package. They're there because they carry the necessary material in multiple languages: the first one contains the drivers, software, manuals in English, French, Spanish, Brazilian-Portuguese, Russian, and Polish; the second one covers German, Italian, Dutch, Czech and Hungarian.

But now what about those papers? Between them there are safety precautions; Macintosh *only* precautions; a huge sheet on which appears the scanner's specifications; quick start guides; two more papers related to the European Warranty System (EWS) and another one stating that, according to some laws and directives, this product can't be thrown out with household waste. Keep in mind that *all* of these guides, precautions, notes, and specifications are shown in all 11 languages. Let's move on.

Installation and Setup

Now I've placed the scanner on my desk. I've plugged in the USB cable, and everything is hooked up. I've moved on to install the software and the drivers. Even though Windows 2003 Server does not appear in the OS compatibility list, it's working flawlessly for me. The installation process does take a few minutes.

Then I started CanoScan Toolbox 4.9. What is it? It's a program which streamlines the whole scanning process.

Check out a screen shot to see how it looks: 

As you can see, this toolbox has quite a few features. Among the interesting and useful software included is ScanGear too: it previews for you the scanned images, lets the user configure the way items are scanned, use correction features and more. And the last piece of software is the ScanSoft OmniPage SE (Special Edition). It is a very intelligent application with the OCR (optical character recognition) feature. It can scan whole document pages, reports, images, photos and transform text from those into editable texts compatible with your favorite document manipulation software. OCR analyzes the character shapes from scanned images and recognizes and transforms them into editable text.

We can't forget about the included ArcSoft PhotoStudio; it's a nice and easy to use image manipulation application, if a bit low-end. That covers all the included software. Now, let's move on to the real thing; I'll scan some documents and pictures and analyze the results.

Next: How is its Performance? >>
 

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