Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 Review

The Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 is a notebook-sized, USB-C-powered flatbed scanner that delivers high-quality photo scans at 2400 DPI for less than most budget options. Ideal for preserving photos, historical documents, and heirlooms in archival detail, it scans gently without roller damage and stows away to save precious desk space.

Scan Quality

Black-and-white text document scanning quality isn't exactly where the Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 shines. Or maybe it shines too much, as some of our results were possibly overexposed, producing grain, noise, and faded text, but more on that in a bit.

Scanning receipts can be a challenge for many scanners. Low-quality thermal paper often leads to faded text, and the paper's semi-reflective surface can wash out scans, regardless of the optical quality of the sensors. To our surprise, the Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 struggled a bit more than other scanners in this area.

Scanned receipts produced digital versions of faded text and sections where the text was almost completely missing. Uneven fills and degraded ink on receipt text proved challenging for the Canon CanoScan LiDE 300, but it fared much better with standard printed text documents.

Text clarity of document scans was very good overall. The digital version filled in the lettering, so the text turns out dark and bold. Our only complaint is a noticeable grain around the text, which is even more apparent under magnification.

Given the mixed results from receipt text and text document scanning, we weren't sure what to expect from the LiDE 300 for handwritten notes. The results were also mixed, with the apparent ability to preserve color writing more accurately than black-and-white writing, but both remained legible. Blue ink, while preserved better than black ink, also produced a much darker blue-black color.

If you need to scan important or sensitive documents, you might consider a different model, but this one does a better-than-expected job for its price.

Speed

The Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 is a flat-bed scanner with no automatic document feeder or paper trays; it would be impractical to think it could be fast or practical for processing large volumes of documents. It just isn't where this thing stands out.

The most common use case for scanners in the home or home office is digitizing and preserving documents, especially stacks of multi-sided documents. One of our test tasks has models scan a 10-page, double-sided black-and-white document and time the process. Because the Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 is a flatbed scanner, this operation requires a lot of user attention, and the 10-page task took over a minute per page. In other words, expect a 10-page double-sided job to take 15 minutes of your time, with a lot of manual work.

File Management

The Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 doesn't perform optical character recognition as well as other models we tested, and had an accuracy limited to three-letter words or smaller. The resulting digitized text made it a futile effort to try to digitally search text. With a rough start, it's no surprise that a digitized document wouldn't preserve formatting. Copying and pasting digitized text into a Google Doc results in seemingly random lettering.

File management isn't much better or more robust than the model's underwhelming optical character recognition abilities. The Canon IJ Scan Utility Lite software is bare-bones, offering only utility settings and no internal document organization.

Fortunately, it offers some file-destination settings, so you can add an application, attach documents to an email, or send scans to a local folder.

Photo Scanning

The Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 is not fast; its document scanning quality is hit or miss; it doesn't excel at optical character recognition; and the Canon IJ Scan Utility Lite file management software isn't our favorite. However, its photo scanning ability is impressive and the results are almost immaculate, making it perfect for archiving photos.

Our tests are designed to create challenges and highlight top performances, while identifying where a model struggles. Shades of blue in the sky, windows, and clouds are often challenging to replicate accurately while still matching the original print.

The Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 handles those challenges with ease. Reproducing digital images with spot-on color accuracy. Colors in the sky, clouds, and windows are all very close to the original, and both the contrast and exposure are nearly perfect. This model does not try to overcompensate or overcorrect these blues the way many of the other scanners we've tested do. Only on really close examination do any bright areas seem a tad too bright, but no scan noticeably takes away from the quality of the results.

Resolution is also very sharp, and finer details like frame rails and reflections are well preserved and visible when zoomed in. We also found the LiDE 300 was excellent at preserving natural-looking skin tones, perfectly replicating natural warmth and color without adjustments to saturation or vibrance. If we had to be hypercritical for the sake of finding some reason to quibble, it would be that some reflected light isn't as shiny as the original.

Our team was also very impressed with the clarity of the digitized images. There are only minor distortions when you zoom in fully on features like a watch, but the smallest details, like a watch dial, remain visible and relatively grain-free. Overall, photo scanning with the Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 is impressive, and the results give it a place among the top scanners we've tested.

Warm tones and accurate colors do justice to the original images.   Credit: Matt Lighthart

Zooming in reveals details that are preserved very well.   Credit: Matt Lighthart

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Should You Buy the Canon CanoScan LiDE 300?

We loved the Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 for a handful of reasons. It is only the size of a notebook, USB-C powered, delivers high-quality scans at up to 2400 DPI, and costs less than most budget sheet-fed scanners on the market, making it a practical choice for preserving photos, historical documents, and family heirlooms in archival-quality detail. It is not meant to handle stacks of documents; for that, you'll want a scanner with a document feeder, but for photo and heirloom preservation, you won't regret your purchase.

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