Planon Printstik PS910 review

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. Measuring only 50x275x28mm, the Printstik should easily fit inside a briefcase or laptop bag. You can connect via Bluetooth or a mini-USB port. The mini-USB port can be used to charge the printer from either a PC or the accompanying mains adaptor. Once fully charged, its battery lasts for around 30 pages.

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, with text and images being formed by a heated print head. Because the paper comes on a roll, you have to tear off each page as it's printed or you'll end up with your document printed on a continuous piece of paper. There's a built-in blade, but it's very easy to rip your page rather than tear it off neatly.

The Printstik PS910 is surprisingly noisy, clicking and grinding its way through painfully slow print jobs. A page of text printed in one minute, and 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, so it prints it in half the space and at twice the speed. High-quality prints are full sized, and use the maximum resolution of 200x400dpi.

At the time of writing, drivers are only available for PCs and BlackBerry devices, but we're assured that Windows Mobile drivers will be out soon. The Windows driver includes only a few options. You can select an original document size of A4, Legal or Letter, choose your quality setting and put the printer into paper-saving mode, which works by eliminating white space at the top and bottom of documents. The printer comes with a single roll of paper, which is enough for 20 A4 pages, and refills cost £10 including VAT for a pack of three, which works out at 17p per page.

Despite its flaws, the PS910 could be very useful. You could print documents such as maps or check-in details while travelling. It could also be handy for printing invoices for clients on the spot.

We're sure someone will find this tiny printer invaluable. However, its incredibly slow print speeds, high running costs and poor print quality make it a niche product. Canon's battery-powered Pixma iP100 may be bigger, but it's also cheaper to buy, costs less to run and produces stunning colour and mono prints.