On paper (pardon the pun), the Brother PocketJet 6 Plus PJ663-K ($529 direct) is almost identical to the Brother PocketJet 6 PJ662-K ($449 direct, 3.5 stars) with one critically important difference. The Plus refers to a higher resolution, at 300 dots per inch (dpi) instead of 203 by 200 dpi. That's enough of a difference to make small text more readable and give graphics and photos a significant boost in quality. It's also enough to earn the PocketJet 6 Plus a higher rating, and to make it Editors' Choice for its category.

Both PocketJets are thermal printers. Brother says it sells both largely for in-vehicle use, printing from a delivery truck or a police car for example, but both are also useful for more office-centric road warriors. As I've pointed out in other thermal printer reviews, 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, and it's not true of either PocketJet.

The Editors' Choice Brother MW-260 ($549.95 direct, 4 stars), for example, a small format printer for A6-size paper (4.1 by 5.8 inches), uses thermal paper with no smell at all, and with much the same look, feel, and thickness as standard plain paper. The same comment applies to the PocketJet 6 Plus (as well as the PocketJet 6) for the paper I used in my testing, and, according to Brother, for all of its other papers as well.

Note that Brother sells the same printer with different assortments of accessories and features, as the PJ623-K ($379 direct) for the printer only without Bluetooth, the PJ663-K ($429 direct) for the printer only with internal Bluetooth, and the PJ623-K ($479 direct) without Bluetooth, but with a battery, AC adaptor, USB cable, and soft carrying case. The PJ663-K, as tested, is essentially the PJ623-K with internal Bluetooth added.

Portability and Setup
The PocketJet 6 Plus is first and foremost about portability. The printer weighs just 1.1 pounds by itself, or 1.3 pounds with its rechargeable battery, and it measures just 1.2 by 10 by 2.2 inches (HWD). The combination makes it easy to slip into a laptop case or briefcase, and light enough to carry around without a second thought. Even better, Brother says you can print about 100 pages on a single battery charge.

Setup consists of little more than inserting the battery and plugging in the AC adaptor to let the battery charge. You can then install the driver on your computer, setting it up 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 currently limited to 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
I ran my tests from a Windows Vista system over a USB connection. As with the PocketJet 6, Brother rates the printer at 6 pages per minute (ppm). Given that converting the image to the PocketJet 6 Plus's 300 dpi resolution takes less processing than converting it to PocketJet 6's 203 by 200 dpi, however, there's no reason to expect the two printers to actually print at the same speed.

As with the PocketJet 6, I wasn't able to run all of our usual performance tests, because manually feeding cut sheets makes the print speed for multipage documents depend a lot on how quickly you can feed the paper. However, the time for a single page on two of our one-page documents was 15 seconds for one Excel document consisting primarily of text, and 42 seconds for an Excel full-page line graph with a solid black background.

As one point of comparison, the PocketJet 6 was a touch faster for the first, at 12 seconds, but significantly slower for the second, at 55 seconds. To help put both sets of numbers in context, note that the thermal-printer based Planon PrintStik PS910 ($270 street, 2.5 stars) took 36 seconds for the first file and 10 minutes 44 seconds for the second, making the PocketJet 6 Plus far faster for both, while the inkjet-based Canon Pixma iP100 Photo Printer ($249.99 direct, 4 stars) took 13 seconds for the first and 29 seconds for the second.

Quality, Paper and other Issues
Output quality for the PocketJet 6 Plus is impressively good for a thermal printer. Text quality is on a par with a typical inkjet, making it good enough for most business purposes. Graphics, similarly, are generally acceptable for internal business use. As with the PocketJet 6, there's obvious dithering in the form of visible patterns, but it's not quite as obvious or as objectionable with the PocketJet 6 Plus, thanks to the higher resolution. Photo quality is a match for the low end of the range for mono lasers, making it good enough to print recognizable photos from Web pages.

As I've already mentioned, Brother gives you a choice of paper for the PocketJet 6 Plus. Which one you choose will affect the cost per page, life of the image, and overall speed of printing, after you count in the need to feed cut sheets manually or not. I used 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.

As with the PocketJet 6, the PocketJet 6 Plus would be more generally useful if it worked with a wider variety of devices, but if you need a printer for your laptop or for one of the mobile devices it supports, that's beside the point. The printer's speed and output quality is more than good enough for printing e-mails and attachments that you need to see in hard copy, and the look and feel of the paper even make it suitable for printing, say, a proposal on the spot and handing it to a potential customer or client. It is, in short, more than good enough for most portable printing needs, and an easy pick for Editors' Choice.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:
Check out the test scores for the Brother PocketJet 6 Plus

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Brother PocketJet 6 Plus with several other printers side by side.

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