HP Officejet 150 Mobile All-in-One

Given that portable printers are definitively niche products, the Officejet 150 Mobile All-in-One ($399.99 direct) is effectively designed for a niche within a niche. Not many people need portable printers, and of those who do, even fewer need portable scanners too. That said, if you need to lug around both a portable printer and a portable scanner, the Officejet 150 multi-function printer (MFP) can serve both purposes, letting you print, scan, and copy with just one portable gadget.

The printer side of the Officejet 150 is in the same class as the Canon Pixma iP100 Photo Printer ($249.99 direct, 4 stars) and the closely matched HP Officejet 100 Mobile Printer ($279.99 direct, 4 stars). In fact, HP says that the printer engine in the Officejet 150 is essentially identical to the Officejet 100, which pretty much guarantees similar performance. Most important is that the output quality for all three of these printers is at the level you'd expect from desktop inkjets. However, you're paying a premium for portability, making all of them a lot more expensive than equivalent desktop models.

With the Officejet 150, of course, you also get a scanner. The scan capability is roughly equivalent to what you can find in any number of portable scanners, including, for example, the Epson WorkForce DS-30 ($179.99 direct, 3 stars). More precisely, as with the DS30, the Officejet 150 is limited to manually feeding pages, one at time, and to simplex (one-sided) scanning. This can obviously be an issue if you need to scan documents that are more than a few pages long. However, if a simplex, manual-feed scanner is sufficient, the Officejet 150 can certainly handle the job as well as any separate manual feed scanner.

The Basics
Like the Officejet 100 it builds on, the Officejet 150 is bigger and heavier than some laptops, at 3.5 by 13.9 by 6.9 inches and 6.4 pounds by itself, or 6.8 pounds with the rechargeable battery.

Very much worth mention is the claimed battery life, at 500 printed pages or 140 scanned pages. That's a fairly impressive number when you consider that the Officejet 150's maximum monthly duty cycle??the maximum it's designed to print in a month without damage?is also 500 pages. Start out with a fully charged battery, and you should usually be able to do without having to carry the power adaptor with you.

The cartridge yields are also worth pointing out as reasonably high, at 500 pages for the high-yield black cartridge and 560 pages for the high-yield tri-color cartridge. Although it's always smart to carry spare cartridges, these yields are high enough so you won't run out of ink very often. Another nice touch too is the ample 50-page input tray.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality
The only connection choices for the Officejet 150 are Bluetooth and a USB cable, which I used for my tests. Setup was standard fare.

Like other portable printers, the Officejet 150 is a little slow for the price. On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software), I clocked the printer at a sluggish 1.8 pages per minute (ppm), which makes it tied with the Officejet 100 and a little slower than the Canon iP100, at 2.5 ppm. The photo speed was also slow, averaging 2 minutes 39 seconds for a 4 by 6, compared with 1:45 for the iP100.

The good news is that the printer does better for output quality than for speed, with par or nearly par quality across the board. More precisely, text and graphics both fall at the bottom of a tight range that includes the majority of inkjets, and photos are absolutely par for an inkjet.

That makes the text suitable for almost any business need, although well short of what you'd want for serious desktop publishing. Graphics output, similarly, is easily good enough for any internal business use. Depending on your level of perfectionism, you may even consider it good enough for handing out to an important client or customer when you need to convey a sense of professionalism. Photos are equivalent to what you might expect from drugstore prints.

Certainly the two strongest arguments for this printer are that it's an MFP and it has no direct competition (which is, by the way, why there's no Editors' Choice in this category). The iP100 is faster, and both it and the Officejet 100 are cheaper, but neither includes a scanner. Alternatively, you can buy one of those printers along with a separate scanner, but then you have to carry two gadgets rather than one, and making copies isn't quite as simple.

If you need to scan a lot of multi-page documents, or must have duplex scanning, you may be forced to go with a separate printer and scanner, choosing a scanner like the Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula P-150 Scan-tini ($295 direct, 4 stars) that both duplexes and has an automatic document feeder. But if you need both a scanner and printer, and all you need on the scan side is simplex, manual-feed scanning, the HP Officejet 150 Mobile All-in-One is a capable choice and an elegant solution.

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