Quality From Portable Printer
The Age
Monday October 5, 1992
THE battle for your briefcase has reached a new and dangerous phase. Today Hewlett-Packard announces the release of the first serious printer that can properly be described as ``portable". It may be difficult to leave home without one.
The Hewlett-Packard DeskJet Portable _ known affectionately as ``The Brick" _ promises to be the year's hottest executive status symbol, proclaiming that its owner is: (a) a serious traveller, and (b) was recently able to raise the $954 (ex tax) purchase price. A friend of mine who is an MIS manager for a large accounting firm saw the prototype that I've been testing in my office on Friday, and immediately began calculating the size of her order.
It is no coincidence that only 13 per cent of the billions of dollars worth of laptops that bump around the world's airline terminals and hotel lobbies are accompanied by a printer. Until now, portable printers have either been too bulky, or incapable of producing high-quality output, and in many cases, both.
Those of us who are forced to produce hard copy while on the road, have adopted a variety of strategies. We've packed a parallel cable and a copy of every printer driver we can get our hands on, and relied on charm or ingenuity to gain access to someone else's _ anyone else's _ printer at our destination.
Some of us have carried fax-modems, and faxed our output to the hotel, someone's office, or a post office.
A few years ago, I carried around a ``portable" dot matrix printer, the Toshiba ExpressWriter 311, until I tired of the noise, the size, the print quality and the tedious ritual of lining up the paper. No matter how carefully you line up continuous sheet paper, it seems very quickly to lose its sense of direction.
Since then, some of us have compromised on quality for the diminutive charm of Kodak's Diconix 180si portable, which is suitable only for occasional rough work.
Some of us have gained better quality (360dpi) out of that other miniature printer, the Citizen PN48, which has been re-badged as the IBM Portable (Lexmark).
Although I was initially attracted to the PN48, my enthusiasm has waned for a number of reasons, chiefly price _ an unacceptable 36 cents per page _ maddeningly slow output, the need continually to change the ribbon, and poor battery life. I still have some doubts, too, about the permanence of the thermal fusion technique that Citizen uses.
To get acceptable performance and quality, the laptop user in the past has had to abandon briefcase space to my own nominee for outstanding portable performance, the Diconix 701, or the Canon BJ-10e (and the recently released and slightly improved BJ-20).
Now Hewlett-Packard has managed to compress the power of its DeskJet 500 _ a machine that satisfies the requirements of around four million users around the world _ into a package that slides lengthwise into your briefcase, leaving two-thirds of the space free for your laptop. If you have an A4 notebook, you'll have an extra 65mm of freeboard. Hewlett-Packard also provide us with a much more flexible, compact, printer cable, which you can wad up a little like a telephone cord, to save more space.
With its dark grey matt case, and cat's eye buttons, the portable adds an uncharacteristic measure of design flair to Hewlett-Packard's reputation for robustness.
I have never been particularly attracted to ink jet printers, purely because I find them far too slow, although Hewlett-Packard assures me that they have a unit in their laboratory that sprays ink a page at a time, and can therefore churn out 80 pages a minute. That is a decade or so away from commercial release.
In the meantime I found myself quite delighted with the two-page per minute speed of the DeskJet portable _ about twice that of the Canon BJ-20, and about a third faster than the Diconix 701. The quality (provided you keep your fingers off the type until it dries) was in all cases outstanding.
The fact that more than half of all portable computers are purchased by large corporations, with high presentation standards, has meant that the quality of output has been a major limiting factor in the adoption of portable printers.
The in-built CGTimes (HP's Times Roman) and Univers (Helvetica), Courier and Letter Gothic will satisfy most users, but you can buy additional font cartridges if you're fussy, and the Microsoft Windows 3.1 driver allows you to print scalable TrueType fonts.
The fact that the DeskJet has such a good foothold in the market means that you're unlikely ever to have problems obtaining a printer driver, which is one of those hazards you never consider until you've been caught once.
Another, as I've mentioned, is the problem of lining up the paper. This printer avoids all that. With the optional cut-sheet feeder ($154) there are no problems at all. For single sheets, it's been designed not to ``grab" until the page is evenly lined up at the insertion point, which I found was almost immediate.
Clearly a lot of work has gone into the power management features of this unit. It uses a standard camcorder battery (Panasonic PVBP15-compatible), which means they're both cheap and easily available, and once they're fully charged, will print a total of 100 pages, which equals the performance of the Diconix 701.
The Diconix may be heavier, slower, and larger, but it does have the advantage of a shorter standard recharge time of 4.5 hours to six hours for the HP. But the optional ($140) rapid recharger, which recharges two batteries simultaneously in an hour and a half, and also acts as a universal AC supply (which means you'll have to get one if you travel internationally), will solve that problem. One feature that I like is that you can use the buttons to fully discharge the battery, avoiding the nasty nickel-cadmium ``memory" effect, which reduces battery life.
The DeskJet Portable also seems to manage power better. It drops into power-saving sleep mode after two minutes of inactivity, and automatically shuts down after 30 minutes, which is the sort of feature I'd like to build into my credit card. I fear I'm going to have to buy one of these printers.
© 1992 The Age
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