Business trip, road trip, or just a trip across town? Our top tested travel printers will let you print photos, documents, and more on the spot, wherever you are.
At first blush, the thought of a fully portable printer, designed to run on battery power, may seem absurd: Carry your Canon? Haul your HP? Truth is, only a few current portable printers are the kind of all-purpose printing tool that your typical desktop printer is. But printers have seen some serious specialization, and you can find a wealth of portable ones that instead do a single thing well. PCMag has been testing printers for four decades, and I've been in the thick of it for most of that time as resident printer expert. Our best portable printer for general use is Canon's Pixma TR150. Read on for more labs-tested favorites, backed by our rigorous testing; we assess all printers on speed, image quality, design, usability, connectivity, and consumables cost. We'll present the buying basics to know when choosing a portable printer, plus a detailed spec breakout of our choices. sticker maker
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The Canon Pixma TR150 Wireless Portable Printer is one of the most portable and most capable inkjet printers available. Just 4.5 pounds without its optional battery, or 5.1 pounds with it, it's smaller and lighter than its closest competition, if only by a small amount in most cases, and it delivers equal or better performance.
As with most other portables, the TR150 offers output quality well within the range you would expect from an inkjet. But it also delivers top-tier print speed for a portable model. On our tests, it was more than twice as fast on our business-applications suite as any of its competition, and just 4 seconds behind first place for photos, at 50 seconds each. It helps, too, that its cost per page is competitive, and its 50-sheet paper tray is more than enough for most printing needs on the road.
Anyone who needs a portable all-purpose printer on the go should at least consider the TR150, whether they need to connect by Wi-Fi Direct to mobile devices, by USB 2.0 to a PC, or by Wireless PictBridge to cameras that support it. However, one feature its competitors lack will pique road warriors who need to print output at a customer site. You can create up to five templates, save them to the printer, and then print directly from the control panel when needed. That's a neat trick that lets you print an application, a consent form, or a flyer for a potential customer without connecting anything to the printer.
The HP OfficeJet 250 All-in-One Printer is the only current AIO portable inkjet we know of, but that's not the only reason we've included it here. It impressed us enough when we reviewed it to earn an Editors' Choice award for a portable printer, with its ability to scan and copy being only one reason why.
Along with typical text quality for an inkjet, the OfficeJet 250 offers at least slightly above-par graphics and photos. It was also faster on our tests than most print-only portables. And while it can't print two-sided documents automatically (a limitation shared by its single-function competition), it offers manual duplexing, which lets you print one side, then reinsert the pages in the 50-page ADF to print the other side. The simplex (single-sided) scanner offers a separate 10-sheet ADF for scanning and copying. Connection choices include USB, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct, which lets you print from iOS and Android phones and tablets as well as PCs.
A portable AIO is of obvious interest to anyone who needs to both scan and print (including for copying) while on the go. But even within that group, it's not for everyone. If you usually need scanning only or printing only, you could be better off with a separate printer and scanner, to let you carry just the one you need on a given trip. But if you usually need both scanning and printing, the OfficeJet 250 will be less cumbersome to set up. Even better, it may be lighter that the combined weight of two units.
Portable thermal printers are a niche type. They are commonly used for applications that require printing in a vehicle—from receipts in a delivery truck to tickets in a police car. But their light weight and small size also make them good choices for everything from printing a roofing proposal at a potential customer's kitchen table to using simply as a highly portable printer for anything you might need to print on the go. The PocketJet PJ883 comes from a long line of Brother portable thermal models that do this one thing well: give you clean monochrome output from anywhere. This unit delivers highly flexible connectivity (via USB, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, or Bluetooth), and the output quality is better than you would expect from the print technology.
It's decidedly not for anyone who needs color output, but the PJ883 is great for traveling salespeople or contractors who need to generate documents, bills, or agreements on the spot. Brother also offers lesser, lower-cost models for folks who don't need to pay the premium for the PJ883's plethora of connection types. (Sometimes, just a USB will do.)
Most fully portable photo printers today offer wallet-size or slightly larger prints, so if you want a 4-by-6-inch picture size, which the Canon Selphy CP1500 offers, you have limited choices. Fortunately that doesn't mean you have to make compromises. The latest in the long-running Selphy line of portables, the CP1500 in particular delivers a solid feature set; drugstore-grade photo quality, courtesy of its dye sub technology; and a reasonably low running cost, at a bit above or below 30 cents per 4-by-6-inch photo. (The cost covers both the paper and required dye rolls.)
The CP1500 weighs 2.5 pounds with the paper cassette and its dye roll inserted, but not the optional battery, which can print up to 54 photos per charge, according to Canon. This model can print from an SD or microSD card, a USB thumb drive (you get a Type-C, not Type-A, port for that), an iOS or Android phone or tablet, or a macOS or Windows PC, and it can connect via USB cable or Wi-Fi.
In our tests, it took the CP1500 a bit less than a minute to print each sample photo, complete with a protective coating. And the dye sub picture comes out fully waterproof, without needing drying time, and with a long promised lifetime, rated at 100 years.
The CP1500's 4-by-6 inch picture size, image quality, and long life for its prints are aimed at producing photos likely to wind up displayed in a frame or saved in an album, and the image quality is easily suitable for that. If you're looking for a printer exclusively for wallet-size photos or sticking to various objects, you can use the CP1500 for those as well, but you'll have to cut the photos down to size after printing, and depend on refrigerator magnets, glue, and push pins to make them stick.
Printers for wallet-size photos are among the most portable printers today, and this Kodak model serves as a prime example of why. One big advantage it has over printers for larger photos is that keeping the photo size to 2 by 3 inches means the chassis can be trimmed down. The Step Instant measures all of 1 by 3 by 5 inches (HWD) and weighs just under a pound. As with much of its competition, it's designed as a phone and tablet accessory, offering Bluetooth and NFC as the only connection options, printing strictly from iOS and Android phones and tablets.
The printer uses Zink technology, which creates images by heating dye crystals embedded in the paper, without the ink cartridge or dye ribbon some other portables use (another slimming factor). Cost per print is reasonable, at around 50 cents, and the print speed is right-on among Zink printers we've tested, at around a minute a snap. The print quality is also on par among Zink-based printers, which is to say that the prints make for nice stickers and casual snapshots to share, but output from dye sub and inkjet printers tends to look a tad sharper.
create your own washi tape Thanks to smartphones, almost nobody carries photos in wallets today, but there are plenty of other ways to use a wallet-size picture—from scrapbooking to sticking it on a locker door or notebook cover. Using Zink technology makes the sticking part easy, since you get an adhesive sticky back on the pictures, under a protective layer you can peel off (or not). And, of course, if you want to keep a picture in your wallet, it will let you do that as well.