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They call it a pocket printer. Well, OK, you'd need a rather large pocket to carry it in, but the PN60i is shockingly small, lightweight, and portable. Measuring only 10" x 1.85" x 2", and barely registering on the scale at a hair over a pound, the PN60i is a worthy companion to a PDA, palmtop, or notebook PC. It's truly amazing how far miniaturization has come. With a Psion Series 5 in one coat pocket, the PN60i in another, and the Beepwear on your wrist, you're a walking communications and data center with only a few pounds on your person. An optional NiCad rechargeable battery and an auto adapter can give you power under any circumstances. With 360 dots per inch output, the PN60i uses regular paper and can also print transparencies. It comes standard with a black cartridge, but you can also get a color ribbon. We didn't test it with color, so we don't know what type of quality you get. Perhaps the coolest thing about the PN60i, besides its liliputian size, is that it has an infrared receiver that can communicate with similarly equipped desktop and palmtop computers. I was able to pull it out of the box and immediately start talking to it with the Psion S5. Well, I tried to hail it, anyway. I had a mysterious problem with the IR, but after waiving a dead chicken over it for awhile, it started putt-putt-putting away. The crummiest thing about the PN60i is that it does not come with a cable to connect to your PC. You have to buy a connectivity kit (read: cable), either parallel, serial, or Mac/Netwon. These "kits" run around US$40. [The printer connector is a non-standard type that I couldn't even find in the Black Box catalog, so good luck finding the cable for cheaper.]
I had a lot of fun playing with this little gizmo. I just couldn't get over the portability this thing affords. For road warrior types who need to generate letters, invoices, price and expense sheets, etc. on the run, the PN60i is almost an unconscious carry in your travel bag. The print quality is good, not as sharp and error-free as a desktop machine, but hey, it weighs a pound! It did a respectable job on graphs, pie charts, and graphics. In printing out the S5 specs, the Psion logo kept getting sliced at the bottom (moving part of the logo to the right). I never figured out why. The printing has a slightly chunky look around the edges reminiscent of early desktop laser printers. My first laser printer cost close to six grand and took two people to carry. Did I mention that the PN60i weighs only a pound? The design of the printer had one thing I found annoying. The IR sensor is on the side, the same side where you feed in the single sheets of paper. You have to move the printer just out of arm's reach to allow enough room for the paper to fit between your computer and the printer. This means that you can't see the output as it comes out of the other side, and it makes it awkward to feed and retrieve paper. I think they should have put the IR sensor at one end of the machine. That way, you could set it up perpendicular to your palmtop (and closer), so you could reach everything more easily. Back in the Jurassic days of the PC, I read an article about a guy who was very successful running his business (some sort of fever-pitched publishing) from his living room with a Handy Tandy, a 300 baud modem, and a fax machine. I can only imagine what sorts of things can be done with shrinking tech tools like this printer. - Gareth Branwyn [3/6/98]
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