HP Deskjet 450cbi: portable printer strikes a balance of size and power.The Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 450cbi printer recently landed on my desk, and it certainly doesn't take up much space! This ostensibly os·ten·si·ble adj. Represented or appearing as such; ostensive: His ostensible purpose was charity, but his real goal was popularity. portable printer has some amazingly strong features going for it. It's fast, quiet, powerful, easy to connect, versatile, and I had it running with both my workstation (via USB USB in full Universal Serial Bus Type of serial bus that allows peripheral devices (disks, modems, printers, digitizers, data gloves, etc.) to be easily connected to a computer. ) and my iPAQ (via Bluetooth) within five minutes. Back up a moment! Ostensibly portable? That isn't a ringing endorsement. I'll get to the positive features in a moment, but to lay it out straight, before going any further: This isn't a printer you're going to casually toss in your traveling computer bag for use in the hotel room as you work. For that to happen, at least for me, the printer would have to be no larger than the tube at the center of a roll of paper towels. (There are such printers, but they sure aren't as useful or powerful as this one.) On the other hand, if you travel by car, or need to print in full color so much that it's worth carrying a printer that weighs as much as most full-featured lap-tops, you aren't likely to find a better portable printer anytime soon. Like the old Compaq "luggable A portable computer that weighs more than you want it to. This was said of many of the first portables such as Compaq's famous, first machine that weighed 30 pounds, but catapulted the company to prosperity. Today, any laptop that weighs more than 10 pounds can be called a "luggable." " computer (for those of you old enough to rementher), this printer is portable by definition, but it isn't something you'll toss in "just in ease." By the time you add the battery and power supply, the package weighs in at more than five pounds--not an unnotice able amount to be lugging around. Tradeoffs The HP Deskjet DeskJet is a brand name for inkjet printers manufactured by Hewlett-Packard Company. These printers range from small domestic to large industrial models, although the largest models in the range have generally been dubbed DesignJet. 450cbi's specs are on par with less portable inkjet printers. Its native print engine prints at 1200dpi, although you can use an enhanced/ slower mode to print at higher resolutions. The specs say the printer can pop out three pages per minute at the normal resolution (with a mix of text and graphics), so I gave it a try. Printing a 23-page document with light coverage, and about 10 percent color graphics The ability to display graphic images in colors. , took a bit more than nine minutes on the DJ450. I printed the same experiment on nay trusty OfficeJet D135, and it only took six minutes there. Of course, that printer is about ten times as large, so maybe the tradeoff is worth it! I also tried printing a full-page graphic at high resolution on the DJ450, and it's very slow. After half an hour, I walked away. It finished eventually, however and looked beautiful, even on standard paper. The printer uses two ink cartridges (black and tri-color), and you can replace the black cartridge with a photo-quality cartridge for printing photos. (You have to buy the photo cartridge separately.) Obviously, two-cartridge inkjet printers are a little less efficient, ink-wise, than printers that use four (or even six) cartridges, but we're talking about a portable printer here. Two ink cartridges is a decent tradeoff. The battery has more juice in it than I expected--according to HP, 350 pages per charge. I certainly ran out of patience printing before it ran out of power. This printer has more connectivity options than any I've ever seen. It supports printing via parallel, USB, infrared, and Bluetooth connections. In addition, because it supplies a compact flash slot for its Bluetooth card, it supports printing directly from compact flash media. This feature requires that your camera supports the Digital Print Order Format (DPOF (Digital Print Order Format) A file format for digital camera memory cards that stipulates which images are to be printed. At the time of shooting or when reviewing on the camera, it allows the user to specify how many of each image are to be printed. ) standard. Mine doesn't, so I couldn't test this feature. I tested all the other connections, and they all worked flawlessly. My favorite My Favorite is an independent synthpop band from Long Island, New York. They released two CDs: Love at Absolute Zero and Happiest Days of Our Lives. My Favorite broke up on September 14, 2005, when singer Andrea Vaughn left the band. was the Bluetooth connection. The printer came with a compact flash Bluetooth card (the non-reviewer models require you to purchase that card separately), which I inserted. I picked up my Bluetooth enabled Compaq iPAQ, selected the connection, and was printing within a minute or two. If you get the printer with the Bluetooth card, but don't want to use it for printing, you can easily find drivers for the card online, and it works in any computer that supports compact flash cards. I had my laptop talking to Noun 1. talking to - a lengthy rebuke; "a good lecture was my father's idea of discipline"; "the teacher gave him a talking to" lecture, speech rebuke, reprehension, reprimand, reproof, reproval - an act or expression of criticism and censure; "he had to my iPAQ using the card that came with the printer without any effort. Installing the printer software was a breeze, and the software package includes some interesting utilities. For example, the HP Deskjet Toolbox utility lets you monitor both ink and battery usage--a must for printing on the road. In addition, you can upload usage information about your printer usage to an HP site, myPrintMileage, to track your usage over the long term, and to be reminded when you need new cartridges. This seems more like a sales ploy than anything else, and on my second install of the drivers, I opted to not install this bit of the software. UpShot You can find cheaper printers that give you better output, taster taster /tast·er/ (tas´ter) an individual capable of tasting a particular test substance (e.g., phenylthiourea, used in genetic studies). ; but, you won't find any with all the connectivity features of the 450cbi, and you certainly won't be able to dash out an important document on an airplane with any of them, either. As with most technology, you pay a price for flexibility and portability. In this case, however, it's worth the premium. If you need a printer while on the road, give this one a look. ADVISOR[R] EVAL[TM] BUSINESS BENEFITS Although not the smallest printer on the market, the Deskjet 450cbi is an excellent printer, providing unparalleled connectivity options, excellent print quality, and reasonable speed. (+) Small, low-power, light enough (+) Excellent print quality (+) Reasonable speed (-) No outgoing paper tray (paper flies out all over the place) (-) Too bulky for casual travel use (-) No status indicator other than LEDs, so you'll need a manual to decipher error messages DOS and Windows error messages are listed individually in this database by the message that is displayed when they occur. See also DOS error messages and Application Error. 
Hewlett-Packard http://www.hp.com HP Deskjet 450 cbi US$349 DIMENSIONS: height 3.2"; width 13.3"; depth 6.5" WEIGHT: 4.6 lbs SPEED: 5ppm for black and white (normal quality); 1.3 ppm for color (normal quality) BATTERY LIFE: 350 pages per charge MAXIMUM RESOLUTION: 4800dpi NORMAL RESOLUTION: 1200dpi RAM: 16MB PAPER SIZE: Letter, cards, executive, Legal INTERFACE: USB, Parallel, Fast Infrared, Bluetooth, compact flash card OS: Microsoft Windows XP/ME/2000/NT 4.0/98/95 Technical Editor Ken Getz is a programmer, technical writer, educator, and senior consultant with MCW MCW Medical College of Wisconsin MCW Modulated Continuous Wave MCW Meal, Cold Weather (food ration) MCW Mason City, IA, USA - Mason City Municipal Airport (Airport Code) Technologies. He develops custom applications and tools using ASP.NET, Visual Studio .NET A suite of programming languages and development tools from Microsoft that supports the .NET environment. Upon its introduction in 2001, it included Visual C# and .NET versions of Visual Basic and Visual C++. See .NET. , and Microsoft Orifice orifice /or·i·fice/ (or´i-fis) 1. the entrance or outlet of any body cavity. 2. any opening or meatus.orific´ial aortic orifice , and spends much of his free time researching and testing mobile hardware. He's been a Microsoft MVP (Multimedia Video Processor) A high-speed DSP chip from Texas Instruments, introduced in 1994. Officially introduced as the TMS320C80, it combines RISC technology with the functionality of four DSPs on one chip. award winner since the program began. Ken teaches ASP.NET, C#, and VB.NET (Visual Basic .NET) An object-oriented programming language from Microsoft. It is the .NET version of the Visual Basic (VB) programming language. Like all .NET languages, VB.NET uses the Common Language Runtime (CLR) for program execution. VB. for Application Developers Training Company, and is a frequent speaker at Microsoft events, ADVISOR DEVCON, and other technical conferences. He's co-author of ASP.NET Jumpstart with contributing editor Paul D. Sheriff (SAMS SAMS Scottish Association for Marine Science SAMS Space Acceleration Measurement System SAMS South American Missionary Society (of the Episcopal Church, Inc) SAMS School of Advanced Military Studies (US Army) ), Access 2002 Developer's Handbook series, and VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) A subset of Visual Basic that provides a common language for customizing Microsoft applications. VBA supports COM, which allows a VBA script to invoke internal functions within Excel, Word and other COM-based programs or to make use of Developer's Handbook (Sybex). http://www.developershandbook.com, keng@mcwtech.com. |
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