HP DeskJet 450WBT Inkjet Printer

Portable printers cost more than their desk-bound counterparts, but if you have to print while you travel, you won't find a better printer than HP's $349 Deskjet 450wbt. The 450wbt runs on battery or AC power, and it weighs less than 5 pounds with its ink cartridges installed and its lithium ion battery attached. When closed, it's easy to carry, measuring 13 inches wide, 7 inches deep, and 3 inches thick. Its paper tray folds down and snaps shut to close the printer securely when it's not in use; the tray holds 45 sheets. The 450wbt doesn't have an output tray--finished print jobs simply slide out onto your desk, your car seat, or even a picnic table. The model we tested includes Bluetooth, but if you don't need that capability, you can buy the base model with USB 2.0, parallel, and infrared ports for $100 less.

In PC World's testing, the Deskjet 450wbt operated a little slower than most recently tested desktop inkjets. It printed text at 3.8 pages per minute, whereas general-purpose inkjets averaged 4.9 ppm. Text looked slightly grayish in spots, but letters were well formed and clean--on a par with most of the desktop inkjets we tested. (When we printed on higher-quality inkjet paper, the 450wbt printed heavy black text that bled a little.) It generated documents of mixed text and graphics at 0.8 ppm, compared with the average of 1.2 ppm. When we installed the optional $25 photo ink cartridge, the 450wbt turned out great glossy photos in both gray-scale and color. Color glossies looked somewhat oversaturated but had superb detail, while gray-scale photos looked equally sharp and showed realistic textures. Even the color documents we printed using lower-quality plain paper and the standard ink cartridges looked attractive, with realistic color and sharp focus, though there was some banding. The 450wbt fared poorly on line art, however: Narrow parallel lines bled together, and diagonal lines looked particularly jagged.