Most people don't need portable printers, which helps explain why the category is so sparsely populated. But for those who do need to print on the go, a portable printer like the HP Officejet H470 Mobile Printer ($249.99 direct) is essential. It would come in handy in situations such as printing a PowerPoint handout on the spot for a newly updated presentation, or printing a proposal for a potential customer at his or her kitchen table.

The H470 offers lots of print capability in a small package. It's a little bigger and heavier than some notebook computers, but far smaller and lighter than most desktop ink jet printers, at 3.3 by 13.4 by 6.5 inches (HWD). It weighs 4.5 pounds, or 5.3 pounds with the AC adapter. More important, it's comparable with desktop printers in speed and quality, although you can find those much bigger printers at a much lower price.

As with the HP Deskjet 460 models that the H470 replaces, the H470 is available in several versions. In addition to the base model H470 that I tested, the choices are the H470b ($299.99), with a half-pound rechargeable battery, and the H470wbt ($349.99), with a battery, a Bluetooth adapter, and a soft carrying case.

Those accessories are also available as individual options at $39.99 for the carrying case, $39.99 for Bluetooth, and $79.99 for the battery or $139.99 for a battery plus charger. HP says that a fully charged battery can print 480 pages. Two other options worth mentioning are a 12-volt car adapter ($79.99) and a Wi-Fi adapter ($79.99). The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapters are each fully contained in highly portable USB keys.

The H470 is nothing if not flexible. In addition to letting you connect by way of the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth options and over a USB connection, it can print from memory cards and PictBridge cameras.

Setup is typical for an ink jet, requiring little more than snapping in the color and black ink cartridges, running the automated installation routine from a disc, and plugging in the supplied USB cable. I tested using Windows XP, but the disc includes drivers for Vista and Windows 2000 as well.

The H470 turned in reasonable times on our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com). Its total time (19 minutes 2 seconds) is sluggish by today's standards, but not intolerably so. It's also notably faster than the H470's most direct competition, the Canon Pixma iP90, now available as the essentially identical iP90v. The iP90's total time on our business applications suite was 25:14.

As with many ink jet printers, the H470 offers a choice of printing photos with four ink colors or replacing the black cartridge with a photo cartridge to print with six colors, for better quality. With the photo cartridge, print speed averaged 2:45 for each 4-by-6 and 6:13 for each 8-by-10. The iP90 was a lot faster at 2:10 and 4:52, respectively, but its photo quality was a touch lower.

Photos printed on the H470 qualify as true photo quality—at least as good as you would expect from a local drugstore. Unfortunately, they aren't water-resistant, so you must handle them with care. If you manage to avoid smudging them, however, HP claims that they'll last 200 years if kept in dark storage, as in an album, 80 years mounted behind glass, or 40 years exposed to air.

Text quality is a touch subpar for an ink jet but good enough for most business purposes. One highly stylized font with heavy strokes couldn't pass the threshold for well-formed characters even at 20 points, but more than half of our test fonts qualified as both well formed and easily readable at 6 points. Unless you have an unusual need for small fonts, the H470 output should be acceptable.

Graphics quality was typical for an ink jet, making it easily good enough for most business purposes. The only notable issues were banding in some output in default mode (though not in highest-quality mode) and a tendency to lose thin lines. As long as you stay away from thin lines, the output is easily good enough to hand over to an important client or customer.

Also very important is that HP hasn't skimped on paper capacity and cartridge yield, two areas that historically have been a problem for portable printers. The H470 offers an ample 50-sheet input capacity. By comparison, the Canon iP90 holds only 30 pages. Similarly, the H470 claims a yield of 330 pages for the color cartridge and 440 pages for the black, while the iP90 claims only 100 pages for the color cartridge and 185 text pages for the black.

Canon and HP have a history of leapfrogging each other with each new portable printer they release. That may well happen again with Canon's next model, whenever it comes out. Yet for the moment, the H470 is clearly out in front, with faster speed and better overall print quality. If you need a portable printer, it's the one that competing units will have to beat.

Check out the HP Officejet H470 Mobile Printer's test scores.

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