Mon, 11 Feb 2013 HP OfficeJet 150 review: A portable multifunction printer

We’ve seen a number of portable scanners and portable printers in the past, but HP claims that the OfficeJet 150 is ‘the world’s first portable all-in-one printer’.

It’s very neatly designed, folding down to a compact 355mm wide, 200mm deep and 95mm high. It weighs 3.1Kg with its rechargeable battery attached, which is a bit hefty for a backpack or briefcase, but it’ll be fine to slip onto the back seat of your car when you’re visiting clients.

HP crams quite a lot into that compact case too, including a 600dpi inkjet printer, 600dpi scanner, and a small touch-sensitive control panel that folds up out of the unit when needed. There’s a USB port for connecting to your Mac but the OfficeJet 150 also includes Bluetooth for wireless printing, which means that you can get straight to work without having to fiddle with any cables. There’s no support for AirPlay or iOS printing, though – just Macs and PCs.

There’s also a second USB port and an SD card slot tucked around the back, which allow you to print photos from an external storage device, or to scan documents onto one without needing your computer. The printer includes a 50-sheet storage tray, which should be adequate for most on-the-spot printing jobs, but there’s no output tray so you do need to make sure that there’s some desk space available to catch documents as they feed out of the printer. HP says that the rechargeable battery pack should last long enough to print 500 pages, and there’s a mains adaptor included in the box as well.

The OfficeJet 150 is the world’s first portable multifunction printer.

The OfficeJet 150 isn’t the fastest printer we’ve ever come across, though. HP quotes speeds of 22 pages per minute for mono text and 18ppm for colour text-and-graphics, but our tests produced far more modest speeds of 7ppm and 3ppm respectively. Even so, those speeds are still adequate for just printing invoices and the occasional leaflet for clients. The print quality is very good too, with near-laser quality text and bright, sharp colour graphics.

It can turn its hand to occasional photo printing too, producing reasonable quality A4 photos on glossy paper in just over two minutes. Scanning performance is better, taking just one minute to perform a 300dpi scan on an A4 colour document.

Printing costs are rather mixed. Colour printing is actually quite reasonable, as HP’s high-yield three-colour ink cartridges cost £33.00 and produce 560 pages, which works out at a fairly reasonable 6p per page for colour printing. Mono printing is a little above average, though, as the high-yield black cartridge costs £25.00 and produces about 600 pages. That amounts to about 4p per page, which is higher than average for inkjet printers – but not excessively so.