Review: HP Officejet 100 Mobile L411a Printer

In the midst of all the smartphone and tablet talk, we have been playing with the HP Office Jet 100 (L411a) mobile printer recently. Officejet 100 is a battery powered mobile colour Inkjet. Been asked multiple times by friends and family for mobile printing options, this was a good opportunity to try out a portable printer with wireless capability. So does the Officejet 100 live up to its promises? Delivers on wireless printing promises? Let’s find out! 

To start with the Officejet 100 is a mobile printer essentially for people hating wires or simply the ones always on the go. And this thing is light compared to the other standard printers. But at the same time its quite important that the print quality is not compromised. The printer is essentially successor to the HP Officejet H470 Mobile Printer which costed a little less along with optional Wi-Fi connectivity.

Specs & Design:

The Officejet 100 is an Ink Jet printer. It is a standard all purpose printer with 1-pass color. Connectivity options on the printer include USB and Bluetooth 2.0. There is also the option of direct printing from cameras via PictBridge. It weighs a good 5.1 pounds (5.5 with the battery, that’s 2.5 kgs). Duplex printing is manual via software. Officejet 100 is powered by a 2100 mAh Li-ion battery and supports HP 851/855 Ink cartridges.

You can take a look at the official specs here.

Officejet 100 has a complete plastic body. The paper input is from the top, once you open the lid it acts as the paper input tray. On the front there is a small plastic door that release the printouts. We found both these lids to be a little rigid, you would need to make good use of your nails to open both of these doors (while the upper lid is locked with a hinge, the small door on the front is magnetic). The problem is the missing cut to allow a finger space to push open the lid. Not a deal-breaker, but a design detail that we would have loved to see.

As soon as you open the front lid, the bluetooth, paper release & power buttons are right on top. You can also replace the cartridge by just flipping another cover.

In the box:

The HP Officejet 100 comes bundled with the printer, battery, charger and the USB cable (add manuals and CD).

Performance:

Over the past two weeks we have put the Officejet 100 to rigorous testing. Printing at the office, on the go and even traveling around the town with this.  We tested the printer on a Windows 7 and a MacBook Pro and were able to achieve the following numbers:

Images:

We started off with by printing an image from Photoshop on a photo paper which took us almost 5 minutes to print. We quickly realized that we will be better off printing directly from the image files. And then we managed to get some decent numbers off this machine which is  summarized below:

• 1:02 minutes per image via Bluetooth
• 40.49 secs per image via USB cable from iPhoto (Mac)

Also, we noticed that some printed photos were darker than the original photos, requiring us to adjust them before printing.

Documents:

Printing documents on the OfficeJet 100 is smooth and easy. It also prints at very decent speeds as well. We printed B&W documents in the normal and the fast draft modes, which threw up acceptable numbers for a mobile printer.

• 35 secs per B&W document
• 5.27 minutes for 15 pages (B&W)
• 1 minute for 12 pages in the fast draft mode

One important thing to note here is that the numbers did not show any difference irrespective of it being connected via USB cable or the Bluetooth. The performance in the fast draft mode does the trick for us and we liked the print clarity as well.

Though the printing speed in our tests did not meet the claims exactly but we are still pretty happy with the decent numbers from a mobile printer.

We did a battery test on this device and printed 150 text documents (with 1 line of color text). We started the test with a fully charged battery and ended up with 64% charge at the end of the exercise. 100 prints were made using USB and 50 via Bluetooth. HP’s claim of 500 prints on a single charge looks spot on. Heck, even 200 prints are amazing enough for a quick business trip.

Verdict:

The Officejet 100 is a sturdy performer bringing total wireless efficiency with a good battery backup and Bluetooth support. Given the impatience we have developed in the age of laser jets, we could still bear with this Inkjet, the print speeds are acceptable and they get better if you are printing quick documents in fast draft mode.

The use cases for this are plenty. Be it a business traveler who wants to end his/her reliance on print shows during business trips or simply an office printer that saves space, can be moved around without wires and yet deliver good performance. If you are in the former category, it’s worth noting that the Officejet 100 is not very lightweight or portable, get a feel of it before choosing it. The battery life on this is a plus, it does 150+ prints (documents) on a single charge without giving any signs of stopping. The pricing at Rs 14,000 is competitive. The replacement Ink cartridges costs Rs 900 approx for the black one (851) and Rs 1200 approx for the color (855), reasonable given that we have done over 300 prints on this (photos + color + b&w) and still have fuel for more. We also like the fact that HP Officejet 100 is compatible with Mac OS, this one gets a thumbs up from us.

With inputs from Tassavur Shaikh / Photos by Bharat Chhatre