Measurement of the soft X-ray intensity emitted from the plasma formed by focusing a 20 Hz, 500 mJ Nd:YAG laser beam onto solid targets indicate that a similar soft X-ray source employing a laser with a repetition rate of a few hundred Hz will be suitable for scanning X-ray microscopy. At particular X-ray energies, the brightness of such a source is comparable to that from synchrotron sources such as the (non-upgraded) SRS at Daresbury.