Printing on the move / Review HP Mobile Printer H470b

With business demands going 24x7, and customers still wanting to confer with you before they place an order, there are times when I am on the road the whole day. Thanks to a chauffeur negotiating the mad traffic on Delhi roads, I have the option of working on the move. But how much can you accomplish from the back seat of your car? Okay, you have the data card, your PC, some books, and maybe papers, but what do you do if you left one meeting and have to run to another, with a sheaf of printouts? I have encountered this problem one too many a times since my work takes me both out of the office as well as out of the city.

I planned to carry a small printer in the car for just such emergencies. But the printers that were available for in-car use were either based on thermal technology or limited in their printing. That was, of course, a few years back.

It’s June 2008 now and Hewlett-Packard has announced their Mobile Printer H470b in India. Oh well, I thought, it must be just another printer—and how much can you write about a printer anyway?

I was taken by surprise when the printer landed in my office. The brilliant use of clear and translucent plastic gives the product a chic look. Its petite size is eyecatching—everyone who spied it on my desk were drawn to it, with a “Boss, what’s that?”

The size of the H470b may deceive you into thinking it will print only on small sheets. But, no problem, the printer takes A4 sheets besides envelopes. The sheet tray can hold about 50 pages (but I would not recommend stowing away 50 pages if you are going to use the printer in a car). The size and the weight (the printer weighs about as much as a laptop) make the H470 easy to lug around. The power cord and the adapter are, however, bulky and inconvenient for mobile printing.

The printer connects to the PC using a USB cable, but you can upgrade the printer to work with Bluetooth and wireless (these options cost more, no price available at this time).These will also help Windows Mobile or Symbian phone to access the printer.

One recommendation: Don’t try and print papers in a moving car. Instead, stop the car and place the printer perhaps on the car boot, as the printer needs a stable surface, and not your car seat. The battery will last long enough to give about 400 pages of prints, but remember to charge it every day.

I tested the printer with Linux, Windows and Mac PC, and the prints were nice. The sharpness was nothing to write home about, but then you can’t expect the world in a package as small as this. The built-in memory card slots allows prints directly from a memory card (HP should have included thumb-drive support), and PictBridge capabilities let you print directly from your camera, using the USB cable. Photo print quality, however, is average.

The best thing about this printer was the speed: the first black page came out in less than 10 seconds, and a colour page took about 15 seconds. I did not try printing a 4x6 photo, but you can use this printer to do that too, using photo paper and photo inks.

This is a wonderful product. It price, admittedly, is high at Rs 13,900, but for most of us looking at mobility requirements, what HP has done with a small printer is to make one more impossible possible.

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The Above article appeared in the Indian Express, on Sunday June 08, 2008