First Look: Ultra-portable A4 printer

 

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Posted on 9 Oct 2008 at 17:40

Planon's Printstik PS910 is the smallest A4 printer we've seen. It's aimed at business travellers who need to print files from their laptop or PDA, no matter where they are. Measuring only 50x275x28mm, the Printstik takes up less space than a compact umbrella. You can connect via Bluetooth or a mini-USB port, which can also be used to charge the printer from a PC or the accompanying mains adaptor. The battery lasts for around 30 pages once fully charged.

This mono printer uses thermal paper, which is stored as a roll inside a cartridge. One side of the paper turns black when exposed to high temperatures, so letters and images can be formed by drawing it across a heated print head. This is the same technology that is used to print cash register receipts. Because the paper comes on a roll, you have to tear off each page as it's printed. There's a built-in cutting blade, but it's very easy to rip your page rather than tear it off neatly.

The printer is surprisingly noisy, clicking and grinding its way through painfully slow print jobs. A page of text printed in one minute, while an illustrated page took almost three minutes. Lettering was broken and spidery, and graphics were extremely grainy. Draft mode physically compresses the size of your text to print it in half the space and twice the speed. High quality prints are full sized, at the maximum resolution of 200x400dpi.

The Windows driver includes few options. You can select an original document size of A4, Legal, or Letter, choose your quality setting, and, most usefully, put the printer into paper saving mode, which eliminates white space at the top and bottom of documents to save paper. The printer only comes with enough paper for 20 A4 pages, and refills cost £10 for a pack of three, which works out at 17p per page.

Despite its flaws, we can think of a number of situations where this printer could be useful, particularly if you want to print documents for your own reference while travelling, like directions or flight numbers. It could also be useful if you need to quickly print invoices for clients. You don't need much space to use it and it can print from some PDAs. At the time of writing, drivers are only available for the Blackberry, but we're assured that Windows Mobile drivers will be out within the next month.

This tiny printer is a good idea in principle, and someone might find it invaluable, but at £220 inc VAT it's far too expensive for occasional use. It's further let down by incredibly slow print speeds, high running costs, and poor print quality. Although it's a bit larger, we prefer Canon's battery-powered Pixma iP100 inkjet, which is cheaper, costs less to run, and produces stunning colour and mono prints.

Author: Kat Orphanides