The Brother PocketJet 6 PJ662-K ($449 direct) belongs to a category of printers that's easy to overlook: namely, portable thermal printers. Although Brother sells these printers largely for in-vehicle printing, in a delivery truck or a police car for example, they're also useful for more office-centric road warriors. Given that there aren't a lot of portable printers of any kind, they're certainly worth investigating. The category in general may well be a lot more capable than you expect. The PocketJet 6 in particular is a pleasant surprise.

For many people, thermal printing brings up an image of a low-end fax machine with thermal paper rolls that tend to turn pages into scrolls with an unpleasant chemical odor. But that's not an absolute requirement for the technology. When I reviewed the Planon PrintStik PS910 ($270 street, 2.5 stars), for example, I pointed out that Planon also sold paper as cut sheets, and that the paper had a much more pleasant, non-chemical smell to it than used to be the norm.

More recently, in my review of the Editors' Choice Brother MW-260 ($549.95 direct, 4 stars), a small-format printer for A6-size paper (4.1 by 5.8 inches), I mentioned that the paper had no smell at all, and that it offered much the same look, feel, and thickness as standard plain paper. I can make the same comment about the paper I used for testing the PocketJet 6, and Brother says it applies to all of its other papers as well.

Note too, that the same printer is available with different assortments of accessories and features, as the PJ622-K ($299 direct) for the printer only without Bluetooth, the PJ662-K ($349 direct) for the printer only with internal Bluetooth, and the PJ622-K ($399 direct) without Bluetooth, but with a battery, AC adaptor, USB cable, and soft carrying case. The PJ662-K, as tested, is essentially the PJ622-K with internal Bluetooth added.

Portability and Setup
The focus for the PocketJet 6 is on portability. The printer weighs just 1.1 pounds, or 1.3 pounds with the rechargeable battery loaded, making it light enough to carry around without a second thought. Even better, at 1.2 by 10 by 2.2 inches (HWD), you shouldn't have a problem finding room it in your laptop case or briefcase.

Setup is easy. Insert the battery, plug in the AC adaptor, and let the battery charge. (Brother says you can print about 100 pages on a single charge.) You can then install the driver on your computer, setting it up either to print over a Bluetooth or USB connection. Brother offers drivers for Windows 7, Vista, XP, Mac OS X 10.4 and above, and Linux.

Support for mobile devices is somewhat limited, with options for printing only from Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry operating systems. Although there's no way to print from other smartphones at this writing, Brother says a solution for Android-based phones and tablets should be available in May 2011. It also expects to add iPhones to the list at some point.

Speed and Output Quality
I ran my tests from a Windows Vista system over a USB connection. I wasn't able to run all of our usual performance tests, because the paper feed with cut sheets is strictly manual feed. That makes the actual print speed for multipage documents vary depending on how quickly you can feed the paper.

That said, the time on two of our one-page documents was 12 seconds for one Excel spreadsheet consisting primarily of text and 55 seconds for a full page Excel line graph with a solid black background. The spreadsheet page, at least, was close to Brother's 6 page-per-minute rating for the printer.

To help put these numbers in context, the PrintStik's times for those two pages was 36 seconds for the first and 10 minutes 44 seconds for the second, making the PocketJet 6 much faster for both. Brother's higher resolution, and Editors' Choice, PocketJet 6 Plus PJ663-K ($529 direct, 4 stars) was a touch slower for the first, at 15 seconds, but significantly faster for the second, at 42 seconds. The 4.4-pound, inkjet based Canon Pixma iP100 Photo Printer ($249.99 direct, 4 stars) took 13 seconds for the first and 29 seconds for the second.

The printer's 203 by 200 dot-per-inch (dpi) resolution takes a toll on quality. Text quality is a step below what you would expect from a typical inkjet, with characters showing a touch of raggedness even at 10 and 12 points. However, the text is certainly readable enough to let you print e-mails or attachments so you can read them as hardcopy.

Graphics are generally acceptable for internal business use, but with obvious dithering, in the form of visible patterns, in almost every shade of gray. One Excel graph, with thin white lines against a black background was unusable, with no lines showing at all. Photo quality is not quite up to challenging a typical mono laser, but good enough to print recognizable photos from Web pages.

Paper and Other Issues
It's important to know that Brother sells an assortment of paper types for the PocketJet 6, and that the paper you use will affect the cost per page, life of the image, and overall speed (including time spent manually feeding cut sheets, for example). The paper I used for my tests was Premium letter size, which has a 20-year archiveability rating and comes in boxes of 100 sheets at about 13.1 cents per sheet at list price.

Other choices include Premium paper in legal size, fanfold letter size, roll, and perforated roll formats; Standard paper (with a 7-year rating) in rolls and perforated rolls; and Weatherproof (Read: water resistant) paper, with a 20 year-rating, in roll format. The price per page for the various choices ranges from 6.5 to 24.8 cents at list price, but Brother says that street prices are often lower.

The PocketJet 6 would be useful to a lot more people if it worked with a wider variety of devices. And if you need higher-quality output than its 203 by 200 dpi can deliver, you need to look elsewhere in any case, starting with the PocketJet 6 Plus and the Pixma iP100. If you want to print from a laptop or one of the mobile devices it works with, however, and the output quality isn't critical, the PocketJet 6 can be a comfortable traveling companion and a potentially good fit for printing on the go.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
Check out the test scores for the Brother PocketJet 6 PJ662-K.

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