Print 'n' Go With Canon's 2-Pound Ink Jet

No doubt you've heard of subnotebooks. Well, the new Canon BJC-50--at a list price of $349--is what you might call a subprinter: About the same size as a cigarette carton and weighing just 2 pounds, this color ink jet qualifies as the company's smallest, lightest, most completely mobile printer.

Those scant 2 pounds include the weight of the BJC-50's built-in, rechargeable battery. They don't include the unit's AC adapter and parallel cable, but you can get along without these: The battery is good for about 100 pages of output on a single charge, and the printer includes an infrared port for wireless printing from notebooks. However, I wouldn't recommend that you print in a public place, such as a plane: the BJC-50's annoying whine will almost certainly bother your fellow passengers.

In my informal tests of a preproduction unit, the BJC-50 cranked out about three plain-text pages per minute. That doesn't rival the speed of the quickest desktop ink jets, but it's much faster than Citizen's PN 60i, a $399 thermal printer that's smaller still. An optional high-capacity all-black ink cartridge makes monochrome printing speedier and cheaper; a $99 scanner cartridge turns the printer into a sheet-fed color scanner.

The BJC-50 doesn't come with a paper tray, so you must laboriously insert paper one sheet at a time--or pay $59 for the optional 30-sheet feeder, which will add weight and bulk. Alternatively, you could pay $50 less for the heftier (a whopping 3.1 pounds) BJC-80 with its built-in 30-page sheet feeder, but then you wouldn't get a built-in battery. If portability matters most, the BJC-50 could make a splendid traveling companion.

SUMMARY

Canon BJC-50 PRO: Tiny, lightweight, includes built-in battery. CON: Noisy, costs more than similar desktop models. VALUE: Great for printing in limited quantities on the road. $349 Canon Computer Systems 800/652-2666 www.ccsi.canon.com