How to Choose a Portable Printer

This is an age when people are constantly on the move. Our schedule can be called up at the touch of a fingertip, we carry our email in our hands, and of course we have our cell phones stuck in our ears all the time. Hence, it is no surprise that an increasing number of gadgets that were once confined to the office are being designed these days to be able to move with us. A prime example being – the portable printer.

So, What is a Portable Printer?

Designed to be compact and streamlined to be efficient, you can take the portable printer wherever you go, providing you the ability of printing important documents immediately, whenever you need to, regardless of wherever you may be at the time. Of course, business travelers find the portable printer the most advantageous since they can take printouts of their documents through their laptop from anywhere, whether in a hotel room or in an airplane. Most of them find this convenience priceless because it gives them the ability of maximizing their use of time.

What are the Advantages and Uses of a Portable Printer?

Apart from being high on functionality and efficiency, portable printers in general weigh below five pounds, which makes it easy to carry them in a notecase or briefcase. Many of them don’t even need an electric source of power, being operable through a car adapter, AC adapter, or NiMH, NiCd, or Lithium Ion battery. In addition, most portable printers can be set up to function as a home office printer too. Plus, they are high on speed and quality too, delivering print quality that is as good as desktop printers, which they can churn out speedily.

When a portable printer is taken on a business trip, it can be used to print the following things:

• Photographs of real-estate properties or products that can be given to clients.
• Web pages that can be shared with colleagues during meetings.
• Presentations made in PowerPoint as a backup – this comes in particularly useful if you happen to amend your presentation while traveling.
• Boarding passes of the airplane you are traveling by.
• You can even printout contracts.
• Driving directions taken from a mapping website online.

What to Look For While Choosing a Portable Printer

When it comes to choosing a portable printer, most major printer companies make them these days. Whether it is Canon, HP, Brother or any of the other well-known brands are offering an increasingly wider selection. There are portable printers that have the ability of just handling documents in black-and-white, or full color, or images that are of photographic quality, or even those that can produce high definition laser output.

Of course, your exact requirements will help you to decide on the right model. For example, what kind of printing will you need to do? Will you require color printouts or not? Will the quality of the printing be an important factor? And, what will be the volume of your printing?

Check Out the Inkjet Portable Printer: Amongst all the types of printers, the inkjet is considered the most versatile. They can be used for producing text, photographs, and graphics. The quality and accuracy is mainly dependent on the dpi, or dots per inch. The more the dots per inch, the better the quality, in terms of the sharpness of the graphics or text, and the colors and shades in photos.

However, the dpi can vary according to the kind of ink used, as well as the fonts, shading and colors. You will need to check out the quality yourself, which is best done by asking a reputable dealer to provide a demonstration. Inkjet printers use different kinds of paper according to whatever task needs to be done, and the type of paper used can influence the quality of the printing. For example, photographic paper will be required for printing photographs, and heavier bond will be used for printing business letters than required for reports or other documents.

Or, How About the Portable Laser Printer?: If you have to make frequent presentations which require several hundreds of pages to be printed out, a portable laser printer would be a better choice, particularly for black-and-white printouts. While the initial expense may be about $700.00, however laser printers use toners that are long lasting, rather than ink cartridges, which are expensive. Hence, if you require making high-volume printing while on the move, a portable laser printer will prove to be less costly in the end.

Perhaps the Portable Thermal Printer is What You Need: In case all you require to print are receipts and invoices, perhaps a thermal printer would suit your needs. Originally, fax machines used this method of print transfer, although they later switched over to toner and plain paper, since thermal paper is expensive. If you do choose this printer, it is a good idea to locate a good supplier and make sparing use of the paper. Typically, thermal printers are less expensive compared to other printers since they do not use ink or toner.

There are really light hybrid thermal printers that can work with laptops, PDAs, and Smart Phones, which are just 0.70 inches in thickness, weighing less than ten ounces, and being capable of producing up to 4 ppm and 300 dpi.

Like many products available in the market these days, portable printers are merely another example of the ever-growing tendency for items that are high in convenience and versatility, which are promising to radically change the traditional work environment.