A photo scanner is the ideal piece of tech for when you want to digitise those physical memories – whether they're in the form of snapshots from your photo album, a collection of slides or negatives... or scanning in signed copies of a new tenancy agreement or photo ID for a visa application or work expenses...
Regardless of what you need a scanner for, here's our choice of the best budget options currently on the market, none of which will set you back more than £100.
Canon CanoScan LiDE 120 Color Image Scanner
Canon's lowest-cost flatbed photo scanner, the Canon CanoScan LiDE 120 Color Image Scanner (pictured above) won't scan film or slides, but is perfect for scanning photographic prints. There's no automatic document feed feature, so it's more suitable for home use rather than the office, but there are a range of scan options, including scanning directly to searchable PDF and image PDF format.
Epson Perfection V19
Offering a 4,800-pixel-per-inch (ppi) resolution, compared to the CanoScan LiDe 120's 2,400ppi, the Epson Perfection V19 is a high-quality scanner. You can scan to image PDF or searchable PDF formats, but there's no way to scan documents to an editable text format, and there's no application software included – although there are so many free photo editors (such as Pixlr and GIMP) available online these days, that this is hardly a deal-breaker. A major plus point for this model is its compact size.
Canon CanoScan LiDE220 Color Image Scanner
A step up from its lower-priced sibling the LiDe 120, the Canon CanoScan LiDE220 Color Image Scanner provides higher-quality photo scans, and you can scan to both searchable PDF and editable text document formats. Software is limited, and there's no photo editor included, but Canon's My Image Garden feature stands in as a photo album, complete with some limited capability for photo-enhancement.
Epson Perfection V39
As with all of the budget models featured here, the Epson Perfection V39 doesn't include the ability to scan film, but it provides you with higher-quality scans for photographic prints than many of its similarly-priced competitors. It can also scan and saves text documents to Microsoft Word format thanks to character recognition tech. Again, there's little in the way of applications, so you'll need to use free software downloads for managing documents, organising and editing scanned photos.