HP Officejet H470 Mobile Inkjet Printer

The HP Officejet H470 could be convenient if for some reason you need a nearly full-size printer that comes with a vinyl carrying case with no handle or place for cables, and that can run off a battery and connect wirelessly or via Bluetooth. But since I'm having trouble identifying when precisely you'd need that combination, and since the printer is slow, expensive, and seems error prone, I'd spend the same amount of money that doesn't offer battery power and a nifty vinyl case but gives faster, better prints.

The HP Officejet H470 is a relatively small mobile printer that can connect via a network (wired or wireless), Bluetooth, or a standard USB cable, which was included in my test package. (Note: There are several different H470 units available, which contain different connectivity options. This unit was the H470wbt, containing Bluetooth and 802.11 b/g wireless print adaptors.)

Print speeds across the network were not very good. Three color graphics pages took four minutes to print (with the first page out in 1:13), and a two-page black-and-white document averaged 18 seconds per page (HP estimates as many as 7.7 pages per minute for monochrome pages). A large (2 MB) PDF file took roughly 37 seconds per page. Black text looked clear and sharp.

Color printing was barely passable. Colors on graphics pages looked decent but were washed-out looking, which is unusual for HP printers. A 4x6 photo took more than three minutes, and colors were fair, but there were a series of lines apparent on the print. I ran through the fixes on HP's troubleshooting page to little avail--the prints still looked bad.

I found the printer to be fairly error-prone and I was regularly looking up fixes. Set up was a pain, too; though I have an HP computer, setting up the software drivers stalled until I stopped two separate HP services from running. This requires some knowledge of how to turn off services); and worse, I now receive constant error messages alerting me that those services are turned off.