As far as printers are concerned, HP is touted as one of the front runners in the market currently. Their multifunction printers are commonplace in most offices as well as homes with functionality and simplicity being their USP. Mobile printers on the other hand, offer slightly limited functionality whilst incorporating an added feature - portability. HP has just come up with their new Officejet 100 Mobile L441 Printer for printing on-the-go. Here’s what we think about Officejet Printer we reviewed.
Design and Build Quality
The HP touchpad is a relatively small printer upon first look with dimensions of 13.7 x 6.91 x 3.32 inches which is roughly around the size of an average shoebox. It weighs 2.5 kgs along with the battery and might not exactly be light, but is definitely portable.
The printer sports a cool silver and black color combination with the HP logo on the top and definitely is one of the better looking printers in the market. Under the top flap, four buttons as well as the input tray and cartridge slot are located. As far as the buttons - Bluetooth, cancel, resume and power ON are concerned, they are easy to use and have a good feedback. The printer also has a brilliantly designed output tray that flips out on immediate power ON. The back consists of the power port, a USB slot and a slot-in for the detachable lithium-ion battery.
Features
The Officejet printer supports a black print speed of up to 22 ppm at a resolution of 600 x 600 and a colour print speed up to 18 ppm at a resolution of 4800 x 1200. The paper sizes supported are standard – with legal, statement, executive, envelopes, cards up to 5 x 8 inches, photo up to 5 x 7 inches, and borderless photo printing up to 4 x 6 inches. The printer has a duty cycle of 500 pages on a single charge with the detachable lithium-ion battery and a paper handling capacity of 50 sheets, according to HP. As far as connectivity is concerned, the printer consists of Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR which allows printing from most Bluetooth-enabled devices. Network support, scanning and fax are not supported by the HP Officejet Mobile Printer.
Performance
We put the HP Officejet through a series of tests in two of the most commonly used modes – standard and economy. We took a total of four test parameters that included printing a text only page, a PDF document with images as well as text, a complete image printout (on normal and glossy paper) and text with different font sizes. Here are our test results.
Image quality of text is good. Prints on economy mode look a tad lighter than the standard printing modes. On our test print with varied font sizes, there are also anomalies noticed along the edges of the printouts. It’s most clear on smaller font sizes. Colour printouts with high saturation show fine dots. In highly saturated images, long bands appear along the image. These marks don’t appear to be from the rollers pushing out the printouts though. Time for printing is relatively higher than full sized desktop printers. A single text printout takes roughly 16 seconds with warmup and 13 seconds without it. A photo printout takes roughly 50 seconds which isn’t too shabby either. Printing a photo using Bluetooth took roughly 34 seconds, which is only a little slower than using USB.
HP claims that the Officejet can print via Bluetooth only from a select range of laptops and smartphones. Well, this is definitely true as neither the iPhone 4 nor our MSI GX660 laptop were able to detect the printer. The Samsung Galaxy S, on the other hand, immediately detected the printer and printing pictures was an absolute breeze after pairing the two devices. A few important observations were – cartridge installation was pretty quick. The printer drivers were installed in about a minute’s time which does help in alleviating its USP – fast and portable. Also, the bundled driver’s CD wasn’t essential for the printer to work which enables quick and easy printing.
The printer has the following drawbacks. First up, too many papers cannot be placed, as the printer fails to recognize them. We tried putting fifteen papers at a time and faced this problem. This might affect users wanting a number of prints at a time. HP’s new product is targeted more or less at executives who require on-the-go printing functionality, for example, at impromptu meetings. The printer makes quite a bit of noise which might be a problem for those wanting to take them along to meetings. Also, it doesn’t have MicroSD card support.
However, a minor problem we had with the HP printer was opening the top lid which jerks the whole printer. Also, glossy paper wouldn’t immediately be accepted by the printer. Users wanting to print photographs often will have to manually insert and ‘fit’ the glossy paper into the printer.
Verdict
The HP Officejet printer currently sells in the market for a price of Rs. 14,000. Obviously, the printer doesn’t have any other functionality per se, like scanning or fax and hence it is a single function device. However, with the single printing function, it is fast and efficient. So, for those of you who have the resources for an expensive single function device, the HP Officejet 100 Mobile Printer is a good choice.
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