Mobile Printing!

This little printer will fit in the palm of your hand. It is 5.85 inches wide, 4.25 inches in length and .875 inches thick. It weighs 8.75 ounces and when you add the batteries and a roll of paper it only weighs 14 ounces.

The purpose of such a small printer is to be able to take it along with you anywhere.

The Printer can be hooked up either by a serial connection or be IrDA capable. (Wireless infrared) So for a laptop computer you can use a serial cable or go wireless and for a PDA you can use it wireless.

The Printer!
This little printer uses thermal paper, no ink cartridges or ribbons to replace. It can use either a roll of thermal paper that is 4.125 inches wide and 8 feet in length or individual sheets that are 4.125 inches wide by 5.75 inches long.

The roll of thermal paper will fit in the printer. There is a slot on the top of the printer to feed the sheets individually. The price of a roll or 100 sheets of the thermal paper is about $10.

It prints in monochrome at 400 dpi and takes about two minutes to print on a sheet of paper.

It will shut off automatically if not used after three minutes to save on the batteries and one hour if the AC is plugged in.

The SiPix Pocket Printer A6 uses either 4 AA alkaline batteries or the AC adaptor included. (You can also use rechargeable AA batteries.)

What you get!
1. The SiPix Pocket Printer A6
2. AC Power Adapter and 4 AA Batteries
3. A Roll of A6 Printer Paper
4. A CD with drivers and applications
5. A RS-232 Serial Cable
6. Travel Bag

PC Requirements
1. A Pentium processor or better. (AMD K6-2 or better)
2. Microsoft Windows 98, ME or 2000
3. Four MB free on your hard drive
4. A serial port or IrDA capable
5. A CD-ROM and a VGA color monitor

PDA Requirements
If you have a Palm or Handspring PDA here are the requirements.

1. Palm OS 3.0-4.0
2. A Hot-sync to PC connection
3. The PDA must be Infrared capable

The Software
The printer uses I/S Complete IrPrint application software that is designed and optimized specifically for use with the Pocket Printer A6. This makes it easy to print from the built in applications.

You must use the IrPrint application for your printing, some files like DOC cannot be printed.

The I/S Complete IrPrint software is on the CD provided.

Overall
The cost of this little printer is $149 and right now there is a $50 mail-in rebate bringing the cost down to only $99.

Running it wireless from a Handspring PDA was no problem at all. You have to point the PDA IR port to the printer for them to work.

It does take between two to three minutes to print a sheet of paper. I like the roll of paper a lot better because it is in the printer all the time and it doesn't have paper jams. The individual sheets sometimes will jam on you unless you place them in very straight.

The print quality is good for the fonts and for graphics it is fare.

The little travel bag that comes with it is nice but I never seem to use it. I do recommend buying some rechargeable batteries, though after using the little printer for a week and printing a couple of dozen documents, the original batteries are still good.

Not everyone will need this printer because of the small size of the paper. For me this is just another gadget toy to play with. For legal size letters it has no business use. So everyone will have to decide if they could have a purpose with such a small printer, I am sure there are a lot of uses for one.