HP Officejet 100 Mobile Printer--A Handy Tool for Road Warriors

Road warriors will find a dependable friend in the HP Officejet 100 Mobile Printer, which offers long-lived battery power and easy to set up Bluetooth printing. It's not the smallest mobile printer I've seen, but it does print in color and gives remarkably good results considering its size. The battery is rated to last as much as 500 printed pages and the ink cartridges for more than 300, and it can print quickly from Bluetooth, so businesses on the go will certainly find it a handy tool. If only it came with a case to protect it from being bounced around in someone's passenger seat...

The HP Officejet 100 Mobile Printer weighs in at just over five pounds (add another quarter pound if you're toting the battery or the AC cable) and is just over a foot long and about seven inches wide. When printers come in such small and portable packages, it's easy to assume that they're not going to provide as much quality as they are convenience. But in this case, that assumption would be very wrong--the Officejet 100 Mobile Printer stands up in many ways to printers two or three times its size.

That's primarily because it relies on two mini-versions of the ink cartridges you'll find in other HP printers that do a good job on documents and photos (to get really small mobile printers often means relying on other technologies that make prints look more like 1980's-era faxes). The cartridges (which retail for about $48 for two--one black, one color) can put out between 330-420 pages, according to HP (your mileage may vary). The printer has a duty cycle of 500 pages per month; the duty cycle represents the recommended maximum number of pages printed in a month. That shouldn't be a problem for those on the road, unless they're really on a roll and getting a lot of contracts signed. Also, the battery is rated for 500 pages before it needs a recharge. Extra batteries cost about $79.99

So how fast is the Officejet 100? Well, "fast" isn't exactly the word for it, though it's actually faster than some larger all-in-ones I've tested. A three-page color printout of text and graphics from the Web took about 1:30 to print, with all pages printing at 30 seconds, including the first page out. Some PDFs took only 16 seconds per page; others took about 27 seconds to start and then averaged about 17 seconds per page after that. End results were surprisingly excellent. Color graphics looked good, black text looked excellent, and there was nothing to suggest that the pages had come out of a mobile printer.

The printer can also be easily configured to print from Bluetooth. Sending a photo from my Blackberry to the printer took about 15 seconds, and the resulting 4x6 photograph took roughly two minutes to print. The results were not spectacular, but that's more the result of the poor quality photos that were taken with the Blackberry than it is of the printer's ability to turn out good results. (And to be fair, when I sent some higher quality images to be printed, they looked very good indeed.)

The printer doesn't come with a carry case, which is a shame. There's one available through the HP Web site for the Officejet 100, but it only states that it fits the HP Deskjet 450 or 460, or the Officejet H470. Perhaps HP can clarify if that bag (it carries a laptop and accessories as well, and retails for $89.99) will actually fit the Officejet 100.

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.