For the casual home user, this is a great scanner. For scanning photograhs to e-mail and for importing images for greeting cards, brochures, and so on, this scanner is just fine. Scanning time is fairly quick. The software allows you to manipulate images to try and improve a photo or cut and paste one photo with another to create an entirely new image. For text, I would not recommend this scanner. Even top-line scanners have trouble with text, so don't expect great character recognition from this low-end model. Again, for the casual home user, you can't do much better than the 5300Cse; it does what most people want a scanner to do and it does it well.