Output Devices

When users take their notebooks on the road, they are rarely very far from a high-quality printer. Such printers can be found at many hotels, at Kinko's outlets, and at many other facilities. Sometimes, however, users want to bring along their own printer or scanner.

Portable Printers

When you design a portable printer, you have to make certain compromises. Such a printer may not have a huge assortment of features. Nor will it be the fastest printer on the market or the one with the highest resolution. What a portable printer will have is the capability to do a decent job of printing while still being small enough to fit into a large pocketbook.

HP sells three mobile inkjet printers. Perhaps the most popular is the DeskJet 450ci Mobile Printer (see Figure 14.19). This printer weighs just 4.2 pounds and has the following dimensions: 13.3x6.5x3.2 inches. Despite its small size, this printer has impressive performance specs . It can print at a resolution of 1200x1200 in black, and even higher in color . Its rated speed is eight pages per minute in black. The printer's paper input tray can hold 45 pages.

Figure 14.19. HP's DeskJet 450ci Mobile Printer weighs just 4.2 pounds.

Portable Scanners

Although they are not actually output devices, portable scanners are so often used in conjunction with printers that I am including them in this section. Because they have fewer moving parts , portable scanners can be even smaller than printers. A typical scanner may weigh just 10 ounces. To save space, of course, these scanners are never of the flatbed variety. They usually require you to feed each page in manually.

A good example is the Visioneer Strobe XP 100 (see Figure 14.20). It measures 11.4x2x1.5 inches ”about the size of a rolled-up magazine. It weighs just 10.6 ounces. To keep weight down, it does not require a power supply and can instead be powered by a USB connection to a laptop. Despite its small size, it has decent specs. It can scan at a resolution of 600dpi and resolve 32 bits of color information (for a total of over 68 billion different possible colors). It even comes with its own travel bag.

Figure 14.20. The Visioneer Strobe XP 100 mobile scanner.