Canon LiDE 400

Is the Canon LiDE 400 worth buying?

Yes, the Canon LiDE 400 is worth buying at £74.99 if you scan photographs, single letters and the odd signed page rather than stacks of invoices. It resolves 4800 dpi and puts an A4 colour page through in 8 seconds, and 5,496 owners rate it 4.2, which is a lot of evidence behind a £74.99 machine.

It is also the one to pick when the original cannot be fed: the glass takes a passport, a page from a bound book or a crumpled receipt flat. Buy something else if volume is the point, because it holds one sheet at a time and the Brother DS-640 feeds itself at 15 pages per minute for £19.84 more.

Is the Canon LiDE 400 fast enough for a home office?

Eight seconds a page works out at roughly 7.5 pages per minute, and £74.99 divided by that 7.5 comes to £10.00 for every page per minute it scans. The Brother DS-640 manages £6.32 on the same sum, £3.68 less, because it feeds and moves pages without you.

The 4800 dpi figure is what that money buys: eight times the 600 dpi of the Brother DS-740D and the ScanSnap iX2500, which is the difference between a photo you can reprint and one you can only look at. For everyday paperwork 300 to 600 dpi is plenty, and Auto Document Fix and Auto Photo Fix straighten skew and correct colour before the file is saved.

How big is the Canon LiDE 400 and what comes with it?

It measures 36.5 by 25 by 3.9 cm and weighs 1.7 kg, so it slides into a drawer or stands on edge using the vertical stand attachment supplied with it. Power and data travel down one USB-C 3.0 cable, and it draws 4.5 W while it works.

A user manual and a cable or plug come in the box, and Canon covers the scanner with a 12-month warranty. It runs on Windows 7 SP1 or higher and macOS 10.11.6 or higher, and the LED light source and CMOS sensor start straight away with no lamp warm-up.

Where does the Canon LiDE 400 fall short?

It scans one sheet at a time and has no document feeder, so a 40-page job is 40 lifts of the lid and 40 waits of eight seconds. At 1.7 kg it is also more than four times the weight of the 390 g Brother DS-640, which is the one that goes in a bag.

Colour depth stops at 24 bits, half the 48 bits of the Canon LiDE 300 that costs £20.00 less, which matters if you archive faded prints and want the most data off the page. Its £10.00 per page per minute also sits above the £6.32 of the cheaper, faster Brother DS-640.

Canon LiDE 400 vs Brother DS-640 and Canon LiDE 300

The Brother DS-640 costs £19.84 more at £94.83 and wins the moment volume matters: it feeds itself at 15 pages per minute and weighs 390 g against one sheet at a time. What it cannot do is resolve 4800 dpi, so for a box of family photographs the Canon is the one to keep.

The Canon LiDE 300 is £20.00 cheaper at £54.99 and slower at 10 seconds a page, but it carries 2400 dpi and 48-bit colour depth. Buy it for documents, and buy the LiDE 400 when photographs are part of the job: £20.00 buys twice the resolution and two seconds off every page.