HP Offers a More Rugged Portable Printer The Officejet 100 is a printer that you can check into your luggage and can either plug into a wall outlet or run off a battery.
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Mobile printing is one of the storied death zones in small-business technology. Imaging tools svelte enough for road duty usually are royal pains to use, and print--at most--a few awful-looking pages per minute.
HP is trying to fix that with its new Officejet 100 ($280). The 6-pound, 7-by-14-inch printer, while far from feather-light, is portable enough for checked luggage and prints a surprisingly high-quality 22 pages per minute in black and white and 18 pages per minute in color.
The Officejet can connect to various mobile devices via Bluetooth, so printing from, say, a BlackBerry, is possible. Perhaps most important, the device can run both from wall and battery power. One charge can handle a full 500-page cycle.
"The idea was to create the maximum battery versatility to print brochures and other material while on the road, but only plug it in every few weeks," says Bret Bottger, market development manager at HP.
This Officejet does have its drawbacks: For starters, no Wi-Fi support. Using it with most PCs requires a traditional wired USB connection with the proper software installed, which can be a drag. And woe betide any business user who forgets to turn it off. The 100 can run itself down lickety-split.
But for bringing some high-quality desktop--or should we say car-top--imaging while on the road, it is tough to beat the HP Officejet 100.
