Review: The HP H470wbt Officejet Mobile Printer
Mobile color printing is something of a niche market, and the products show it. Most of the printers in this space are partially ruggedized (though there’s not much you can do beyond the basics – most ink jet printers have few moving parts). Where the differentiation in this space lies are in feature sets, aesthetics, and footprint.
The HP 470wbt is the latest refresh in HP’s portable printer line, and it’s got a nice, sleek look to it, with rounded edges and a generally sturdy feel, and it comes in a charcoal black that goes a long way towards avoiding picking up fingerprints. The –wbt at the end means that the model has wireless, Bluetooth and a lithium ion battery, allowing it to be truly portable and “usable on the road”.
This doesn’t come entirely without a cost – the printer is nearly three times the price of a conventional desktop printer, and if you’re willing to shop for last year’s model on clearance, almost four times the price. Also, the Lithium Ion battery means that the printer is a bit heavier than you’d expect; this isn’t a bad thing; most color inkjet printers feel flimsy to us, so one that the cat won’t knock off the desk is rather appealing.
What it does offer is five to six pages per minute in fairly crisp black and white, and about two pages per minute for a good presentation print.
What sets this model apart from similar ones from other vendors (and from HP) is its connectivity options. It has just about every variety of USB port we’ve ever seen on a modern printer, coupled with a multi-card reader. It doesn’t handle Compact Flash, so if you’ve got an older high end DSLR, you may be looking for something else.
It’s also got a good Bluetooth connection (good to about 12 feet in our tests) and a Wi-Fi connection that runs into the next room with ease; while you may have some reasons to grumble about the print quality, or the fact that it’s moisture sensitive on the paper pickup arm, you won’t have reason to grumble about trying to connect any laptop made in the last four years to it.
Our chief complaints are that the battery in our model didn’t hold a charge for terribly long and that on days where there was a lot of humidity, the paper pickup rollers would stick and we’d get paper jams. While the paper tray can theoretically hold 50 sheets, practical limits are about 40. Print quality is adequate, but somewhat more ragged than an earlier model we had sitting around to compare to, and it still doesn’t come close to the Canon printers for photo grade printing quality.
On the other hand, if you’re someone who needs to print revised documents from your car, or at a client’s office, this is an excellent tool for the job.
