CanonCanoscan Lide 300 Scanner (PDF, AUTOSCAN, COPY, SEND)

As an artist, I have been meaning to find myself a nice flatbed scanner for art purposes, scanning sketches or what have you, but found myself procrastinating until I could devote time to really look at reviews and figure out a high quality, high end scanner. I found myself in a position recently that I needed to manually sign some documents and get them to where they needed to be by the next day, but my car was in the shop. I thought maybe one of those portable wand style scanners might be good, and I could use it also to scan receipts, but they are so expensive, and I needed some thing that would be delivered the next morning. What came up was the Cannon LIDE 300, which would be delivered between four and eight in the morning, and this was perfect—I could sign the documents, scan them and upload. And I would also have a nice inexpensive scanner for things. I was looking for something that would be an overnight delivery, and dare I say, on the “cheaper” side and this fit the bill. This printer far exceeded my expectations. I realized with the first scan that this little machine was way more useful, and of a higher quality than its price would suggest. Inexpensive, yes, but by no means a cheap piece of equipment. I am on an older OS Mac, so I was worried I would not find some thing that would be compatible with my system, but in reading the reviews, it looked like the scanner would work—and there were some very helpful reviews on how to use the scanner without having to download any software for Mac. It was pretty much ready to go straight out of the box, plug into your computer, go to system preferences under “printers and scanners”, hit the plus sign and you can add this scanner. Use the “printers and scanners” window to access the scanner—just hit the “open scanner” button and it will give you the scanner “user” window. It starts immediately with an overview scan and from there you can change the resolution, the size, rotation angle, even the format —say PDF or JPG. You can even do image correction with brightness and contrast. It’s pretty intuitive —all you really need to do is play around with that scanner window for a few minutes and do some test scans and you’ll see exactly where you’re at. For each new page/item that you scan you need to close the scanner window, go back to the “printers and scanners” window and hit the “open scanner” button again… There may be a way for it to auto detect when you put a new page in the scanner, but I have not figured that out… Maybe I should take a look at the manual, which is still in its plastic bag… L O L. There is a “combine into single document” option, but I chose to just do separate PDFs, and then combined them in Acrobat. And it worked out great. The quality was fantastic! And the color 300 dpi test scans I did on some color items were phenomenal, and when you enlarge them up and look at the detail, I was just blown away… Much higher quality than I expected, and I’m starting to think maybe I don’t need a higher end scanner. As I said, I bought it as an emergency measure, but now I find myself with quite a useful, high-end (in my eyes), and inexpensive little scanner. I will probably be saying quite often “how did I ever live without this”… And again I’ll mention the price is right on point, pretty inexpensive for the quality that I’m seeing, and I deal with resolution/dpi levels In my job as an artist…If you need additional information, go in under the (Amazon) reviews for this scanner and type in Mac in the search window—that was very helpful for me in making my decision to buy this scanner… The information I ultimately used for how to access the scanner without software was from one of those reviews. The scanner worked with the cable that came with it, and in less than 10 minutes I was scanning…No download of software needed for now, but I might check that out in the future. I thought this review might be helpful for others who are on an older system Mac… Sometimes it’s really hard to find useful information on products, regarding compatibility with the older systems…For reference I am on Mac, Mojave 10.14.6. Because yes, sometimes the newer OS does not always equal the best. I will say, with the positive experience of this little inexpensive model scanner, I will upgrade to another Cannon scanner, when and if needed. That’s how strongly I feel about this scanner.PS the scanner does have copy, scan/auto send as part of its functions (buttons), but I’m guessing you probably would need to download some software for those functions. As noted, this was a quick solution for some “emergency” scans, and this device was perfect! I am looking forward to seeing what else this scanner can do.

I really wanted an auto feed scanner to avoid having to open and close the lid each time. Although, I was nervous about some reviews mentioning vertical lines/starches. I purchased a Plustek. There were no guide rail for photos, so, they would feed in crooked. I ended up having to use both hands to try to drop the photos evenly. Then I still would have to scan some photos a second time. This pretty much negated all time savings. Then, less than 100 photos in, I was getting green lines from top to bottom on my photos. I returned that one and went with this cheap canon. I have always been pleased with my canon products. I've scanned thousands of photos so far. Everything is working great. the one button scan really speeds this up. And having a corner to line photos up to makes it worth it to open and close the lid. Can't beat the price!

I bought this LiDE 300 to replace a 20-year-old LiDE 50 because it delevoped a hardware problems. Primarily I use a scanner to make PDFs of receipts, medical records, and such that I receive on paper.Installing the software was harder than it should have been. I elected to use the included setup CD. At the close of software install, I got a confusing message about installation not being complete, but no guidance about where to find the rest of the install. I found I could launch the scanner software separately, but my Irfanview image editor was unable to establish cotact with the scanner software, unlike my old LiDE 50. In a Windows 11 user group, I was advised to reboot my computer, although the installation software had given no such instruction. That solved the problem, but the installer software should have told me that a reboot was necessary. I don't know what the message about incomplete installation was trying to say, because the software seemed to work after just a reboot.The user interface is clunky, which is pretty much the case for all scanners, according to Wirecutter. It feels even clunkier than my previous LiDE 50 scanner, but maybe that's just because I'm not yet familiar with the LiDE 300 software. On the other hand, all the adjustments I would want to make are in there, once I navigate through the menus.The scanner does single sheets, of course. It can also do bound books because the lid is on a Z-hinge, but I haven't tested that. I didn't try the PDF, AUTOSCAN, COPY, and SEND buttons. I needed to scan a couple of those yellow carbonless forms, where the vendor gives you the nearly illegible bottom copy. The scanner did a decent job, after I tweaked color and contrast; by "decent job" I mean that at 200 dpi the writing was faint but readable. On a black-and-while computer printout bill from the auto shop, the scanner produced a quite readable image at 100 dpi, so don't assume you need to scan most documents at 300 or 600 (which are 9× or 36× file file size of 100 dpi).Compatibility note: The included USB cable is not USB-C. The end that plugs into the computer is regular USB-A, and the other end is either mini or micro. If your computer has only USB-C ports you'll need an adapter (male USB-C, female USB-A). There is no wireless option.One nice feature: in preview mode, you can change parameters like B&W versus color, resolution, contrast, and so forth, and see the effect right away in the preview window. The scanner doesn't need to make a new preview scan to redisplay with the new parameters, so you need only one preview scan and one final scan, which saves time.