HP Officejet 100 Mobile Printer review

HP's Officejet 100 Mobile Printer is a compact colour inkjet, designed for mobile workers who need to print documents while on the road using a mains adapter or an optional battery for power.

Announced in April and available now, the Officejet 100 comes from a long line of HP mobile printers, although at 2.5kg with its battery fitted, this model actually weighs more than many of the laptops it is likely to be used with.

However, if you are a mobile professional who needs to produce high-quality prints with some colour content while away from the office, the Officejet 100 is one of very few devices capable of doing the job.

It supports wired and wireless printing using a USB or Bluetooth connection, but sadly has no Wi-Fi capability, unlike the existing Officejet H470. It can also print directly from a digital camera.

This combination of wireless printing and battery power means that users have no need to carry any cables, for short trips at least.

We found that HP's mobile printer produces very respectable looking prints, with crisp black text that is as good as you would expect to see from a laser printer, plus the ability to output coloured highlights and logos in business documents.

The Officejet 100 is also surprisingly quiet, producing just the odd clunk and whirr when printing pages.

You can even output PowerPoint slides and glossy full-page photo prints if required, although the rather small ink cartridges are unlikely to last long if many pages like this are produced.

With a performance of five pages per minute (ppm) for black text and about 3.5ppm for colour, the Officejet is relatively slow by modern printer standards, but speed is not the reason you would choose a device like this, which is not designed for high output volumes. In fact, HP specifies a monthly duty cycle of just 500 pages.

Printers are constrained in size by the need to handle paper, which means there are limits on just how small you can make a mobile printer. At 34.8cm wide, 17.5cm deep and 8.4cm high, the Officejet 100 is about the size of a shoebox.

While compact by the standards of desktop printers, this is still relatively bulky, and buyers who do not need to output colour may wish to evaluate alternatives such as Brother's PocketJet models, which are about the size of a pencil case but print only in black using special A4 paper.

To set up the Officejet 100 for use, you just need to lift the top cover, which doubles as the paper input feed, and flip down the flap at the front edge where printed pages exit. The input feeder holds up to 50 sheets of paper, but there is no output collector so printed pages just pile up onto whatever is in front of the printer.

A small control panel atop the printer has four buttons, including a soft power button, cancel and resume buttons for controlling printing, while the fourth turns the Bluetooth wireless on and off.

Next to the panel is a row of lights showing battery status, if it is charging, plus two lights for the left and right ink cartridges that only come on when the ink level is low, or blink if one is missing or malfunctioning.