Mobile Computing: Insuring Your Notebook

Notebooks & Accessories

Follow Up: Canon BJC-55 Sheet Feeder and Scanning Cartridge

In a recent newsletter I favorably reviewed Canon's BJC-55, a color bubble-jet printer. Weighing just 2.1 pounds, the BJC-55 proved to be a handy travel companion, capable of producing good-looking documents without weighing me down. Until now, however, I hadn't been able to test two compelling options from Canon: an automatic sheet feeder and a scanning cartridge.

For a reasonable $60, the automatic sheet feeder transforms the portable BJC-55 into a modular and compact, albeit expensive ($349), desktop printer. When the BJC-55 is snapped into the sheet feeder, you can continually print up to 30 pages, as opposed to having to feed the printer each sheet manually. If you're considering using the BJC-55 as your main printer, the sheet feeder is a necessity. But if you simply need to print short documents during business trips, beware. The feeder is larger than the printer, measuring 12.3 by 7.2 by 2.8 inches compared to the BJC-55's dimensions of 11.9 by 4.4 by 2 inches. And it weighs 2.2 pounds, slightly more than the printer.

As for the scanning cartridge, it's a cool, convenient accessory--in theory. Replacing the BJC-55's ink cartridges with the scanning cartridge turns the printer into a 24-bit, 360-dots-per-inch, sheet-fed scanner.

In my informal tests, though, I found the $99 cartridge to be of little practical value. The cartridge came with surprisingly sparse documentation and its scanning speeds were sluggish. Its image quality was good, but the included software excluded basic, essential features like rotating and cropping in favor of tools that most users won't need (posterizing, for example).

If you want a portable scanner, consider instead Ambir Technology's $129 TravelScan Pro & PaperPort (which I reviewed along with the Canon printer). Although it's larger than the Canon scanning cartridge, the TravelScan Pro is significantly easier to use and offers better software tools.

Check out the PCWorld.com Product Finder for the best prices on the automatic sheet feeder and the scanning cartridge.

News: A Whoops-Proof Notebook?

Itronix's new GoBook II is designed to take a licking and keep on ticking, to paraphrase that old Timex commercial. The ruggedized notebook can work in all kinds of weather conditions, and the company claims it meets military specifications--such as the ability to survive 26 consecutive drops from a height of 3 feet onto a plywood sheet laid over concrete. (Need I mention the GoBook II is said to be the new notebook of choice for Federal Bureau of Investigation agents?)

The notebook measures 12 by 9.8 by 2.36 inches, weighs 7.9 pounds, and supports 802.11b, Bluetooth, and GPRS/CDMA wireless networking. A base model (1.8-GHz Mobile Celeron processor; 20GB removable hard drive; 128MB of RAM; 12-inch display) costs $4495--a price that might make some people drop their jaw 26 times in a row.