Canon solves mobile print problems

IF you're one of the modern tribe of digitally equipped road warriors, you have probably found yourself in a situation like this: you're at a convention, or maybe a corporate troop rally session, in a hotel. You're working late at night on a PowerPoint presentation to be given at the opening session in the morning, and you need to print handouts for the team.

Or maybe it's an amended schedule you want to print out and slip under everyone's bedroom door, or pop on their plate at the hotel brekkie.

The hotel's business lounge has long since closed for the night - and its exorbitant charges make it out of the question anyway.

Or perhaps you're a group leader with an adventure travel group camped out in Kakadu, or cruising round the Barrier Reef, and you want to publish a daily newsletter, complete with maps and colour photos, detailing what you all did yesterday and the plans for today.

How do you handle it? Canon Australia offers an answer with its Pixma iP100 inkjet photo printer: one of the very few truly mobile printers in Australia.

This gizmo is not much bigger than a box of tissues, weighs about 2kg, and runs on a rechargeable battery as well as mains power. You can stash it in an airline carry-on bag, a backpack, most laptop bags - along with the laptop - or for that matter a Coles or Woolies green bag, and tote it pretty well anywhere.

Canon calls it a photo printer - and it does indeed print out impressive glossy colour photos. The Pixma iP100 also prints A4 sheets in colour or black and white.

It churn out black-and-white pages at up to 20ppm, or colour at 14ppm. A postcard-sized photo takes about 50 seconds.

Doubleclick has spent several weeks using a iP100, and we loved the thing - with just a few reservations.

We found it easy to set up and to begin producing pages in minutes. We liked the speed and print quality so much we began using it to regularly print out a daily four-page newsletter we're associated with.

Canon has put some effort into improving the iP100's output over previous models. The print head has more, finer nozzles - 1856 of them - and resolution has been doubled to 9600dpi.

The battery lasts about three hours on a singe charge, Canon says this is enough to print 290 pages. That should be adequate for most late-night scenarios.

Price of printing out a colour page, in ink and paper, is almost 20 cents. That's better than paying hotel business lounge charges.

Toner cartridges cost $39 for colour, $11.99 for black. They're small and you might find yourself replacing them often.

Most buyers would not use the iP100 a lot, though. It's a portable auxiliary machine for trips. Back home, you're better off using a standard home or small-office printer.

davfrith@gmail.com