Publish and Be Damned: PowerBook Portable Printing
by Remy Davison 

Okay, this isn't just printing for the Pros; it's for iBook users as well. Naturally, I never demean iBook users. They just don't seem to mail me at all. I wonder why.

Now, personally, as those who know me well can attest, I'm fairly partial to Apple LaserWriter IIs. But I'm not expecting you to backpack one of those beasties like Hannibal over the Austrian Alps with die kinder in tow (yes, yes, I know Hannibal didn't cross the Austrian Alps). But I'm pleased to report that the burglar who tried to lift up my LaserWriter IIg is still recovering from multiple hernias at the We Couldn't Care Less Hospital down the street. But that's another story.

Right. You've got your trusty Key Lime iBook or your Bronzed Pismo and you want to...print all this great stuff you're churning out, right? And you want it printed now. Like that resumé that's gotta be in, like, yesterday? Or those...uh...Sarah Michelle Gellar jpegs that strangely appeared on your desktop? In living color, of course. But I'm sad to report, patient PowerBook-lover, that your options are limited, largely to companies like the one run by that woman who wears far too much cologne (apologies to Albert Brooks for that one).

So, what we're looking at in this article is what options PowerBook and iBook users have in the portable printing department. And not just printers you can take with you; we also check out the how, what, why, when and where of how you can hook up to printers in a foreign office in a foreign country. Plus a couple of recommendations for what model of paper-waster you should have hogging your (non-virtual) desktop space.

Printing à la go-go

Probably the king of the portable inkjets (based on sales volume anyway) is the Hewlett-Packard Deskjet 350CBI ($299 street). Not incredibly light (4.3lbs), but small enough to fit into your bag. The 350 has a serial and USB connection and also offers IrDA connectivity via a standard IR adapter (included). However, I've not been able to verify this works with all IrDA PowerBooks, although HP claims it does, as its languages, as well as PCL 3, include the Mac's lingua franca, QuickDraw. Of course, it comes with a parallel connector as well. Included with the 350 is an NiMH rechargable battery.

HP's claimed cartridge life is impressive: 595 pages using black ink and 137 in color. The 350 is fitted with 512K of RAM, 8 fonts and does a 500 pages per month duty cycle. But it's not fast at all: 0.8ppm in color mode (normal, not best quality which is even slower) and 3ppm for black text. The 350 doesn't offer the image quality of the best of today's inkjets, but it does do as well or better than some of yesteryear's laser printers. The HP does 600 x 300dpi in color or 600 x 600 in black and is equipped with a 30-page paper handler. HP claims OS 8.1 is the minimum for USB support and that's about right. But notionally, if IrDA works, an IrDA-equipped PB, such as the 3400 or Kanga G3, should do as well.

From Canon, there's the BJC-85, a color inkjet priced at $349 ($265 street),a 2-pound (3.1lbs with battery) inkjet that far outstrips the HP 350's feature set for not much more than HP's retail price. The BTC-50 prints 5 ppm at 720-by-360dpi resolution in black and 2ppm in color. It's really Canon's updated take on the Apple StyleWriter 2200, another Canon-manufactured printer.

Like the HP350, the Canon comes with USB (requires OS 8.1), parallel and IrDA interfaces. It also offers an international power adapter as standard. According to the spec sheet, the BJC-85's IrDA supports only Win 95/98 and CE, if that's any use to you. Although my bet is you're packing one of those Palm devices, right? In my book, it's a lighter, faster package than the HP and Canon have no less experience of building printers than HP (indeed, they build the print engines for half the HPs in existence). The BJC-85 also sports an optional scan head (part # IS-12) which can be swapped with the ink cartridge and permits the BJC-85 to become a color scanner. Cool. However, it's not clear whether this is Mac compatible or not. My guess is that if it's a TWAIN-compatible driver it just might work.

A third option comes from Citizen, the PN60 ($299). The Mac version costs $100 more than the Win 3.1/NT/9x version. However, strangely, the model that adds DOS support costs $100 more than the Mac edition (?). Note that one of the Citizen's emulations includes the StyleWriter II (!) and you'll need the Mac connectivity kit (part # 2000206) if you order this baby. Citizen claims - probably rightly - that this is the smallest portable printer on the market, weighing in at a mere 2lbs and only using 10"x1.8"of luggage space, so it's not much wider than the paper you slot into it.

The Citizen offers 300dpi color, 600x300dpi black and five emulated languages (including the StyleWriter II). It really wins out in the weight department. With battery, 700 grams, only 500 grams without. If you're not into metric, saw your PowerBook Duo into six pieces, pick one of them up and that's how much it weighs (roughly). All right, all right: 1.1 pounds to save you destroying your Duo.

Quite speedy too. 3 pages maximum in color and 5 ppm in black. Portability comes at a price though: only 30-40 pages of text before you have to swap cartridges. Cartridges, I'm pleased to say, are reasonably cheap however. The warranty (2 years) doubles HP's standard offering though, which's worth thinking about.

8.55 AM: At Your Desk

Non-portable color inkjets for your iBook and PowerBook include higher-end printers such as the Epson Stylus Color 900. Featuring a high-speed print engine and 1440dpi resolution, Epson also claims the 900 uses the industry's smallest droplet, improving resolution and cartridge efficiency. For USB-only equipped 'Books, you can look at the lower-end Epson Stylus Color 740i (essentially the old 740 model which had serial, parallel and USB for older Mac connectivity, as well as PC compatibility). If you find a just-superseded 740, it's worth purchasing for its sheer flexibility.

For high-end color, the ALPS MD-5000 offers 2400dpi - good enough for DTP color proofing. Considering its output, the printer is also remarkably compact and it provides longer duty cycles per cartridge than nearly all other inkjets. Of course, it costs $599 and you'll need a $98 Mac connection kit (which is SCSI-based, so you need a Wallstreet or older, or a USB-SCSI converter like uSCSI) but what did you expect when you wanted 2400dpi?

Print on the Dark Side

Not enough options? Fortunately, Strydent's PowerPrint comes to your rescue. There are four variants: PowerPrint serial, PowerPrint USB, PowerPrint Mobile and PowerPrint for Networks. PowerPrint provides you with drivers for virtually every printer alive (or dead) and a serial-to-parallel or USB-to-parallel cable. It even permits printing to PostScript printers which don't support AppleTalk, as well as printing to Wintel printers across 10/100bT networks. Better still, some variants of PowerPrint permit you to access multfunction wintel-only multifunction printers/scanners, like HP OfficeJets. Sure, it's not the cheapest solution, but think of what it means: you can print to any printer wherever you are in the world. If you own an iMac as well, you might think about buying the iDock which comes bundled with PowerPrint anyway. All those LaserJet 5s and 6s are yours for the using. So if you buy PowerPrint, it isn't just for printing to that one printer: it's for all the printers you'll ever use. If you move about a lot, that really makes the purchasing decision an economic one.

Got a more recent PowerBook? Run Virtual PC or SoftWindows and you should be able to hook up to any printer you encounter. With USB and ethernet on the mobo of the more recent 'Books, you can link up to newer PC printers, although the parallel-only ones are problematic if you don't have the right cable.

Stupid Office Tricks

My personal favorite is hooking up a Wallstreet or older PowerBook directly to a LocalTalk-enabled network printer that's connected to a print server. Sure, you have to stand next to it. But you also hold up the print queue and get to print before anyone else. Before long, there'll be a human print queue wondering where the hell their print jobs went and suddenly the printer is more popular than the water cooler. And you're less popular than a war criminal.

Dead Sea Scrolls

Got a Lombard, iBook or Pismo and want to hang on to that old StyleWriter 1500? Worry no more; all you need is a Griffin KeySpan USB serial adapter. This gives you access to an older Mac printer's serial ports. So any legacy Mac printer - like the QuickDraw Apple Personal LaserWriters which sport a serial port, for instance - can be hooked up to your 'Book.

Older portable printers also abound. There was the Kodak Diconix which was a terrible portable that only supplied fax-quality type (and we're talking thermal fax here) and jammed every time you put paper in it. And GCC's 192 dpi (!) WriteMove, a Mac-compatible serial printer. Bet GCC doesn't like being reminded of that little baby now that they do ads proclaiming their laser printers 'replace' Apple's 16/600PS and 8500 (to be fair, they do too; they're decent printers, with the up-spec ones even providing LocalTalk connectivity).

If you're in the used portable printer market, a better buy is the Apple Portable StyleWriter. A QuickDraw serial printer, this works with OS 8x, but I'm not so sure about OS 9.0x. If you find one, make sure it comes with the special serial-to-parallel cable it was bundled with (mini-DIN8->Centronics parallel, same as the PowerPrint cable), or you'll have some bother finding this. It's a capable 360x360dpi printer, employing the same Canon-manufactured print engine and cartridge as the StyleWriter I and II - which means it's not a speed demon, but good enough for some quick printing on the road. It'll also last 2.5 hours on battery alone, which is pretty good even by today's standards.

An even better, more recent portable is the Canon BJC-85's distant cousin, the Apple Color StyleWriter 2200. Featuring CMYK via two color ink cartridges, it does 360x360dpi in color and 720x360dpi in black. The 2200 prints at 5 ppm in mono and 3 ppm in color. Coming in at 4lbs and sporting a 2.5 hour NiMH battery, as well as an AC power supply (of course), it's worth snapping up if you find a low-mileage example in good condition.

On the HP second-hand portable market, there's the not-so-old DeskJet 310, 320 and 340. Essentially the same printers, they differ largely in terms of the resolution they offer. The 310 does 300x300dpi, the 320 gives you 600x300 and the 340 offers 600x600. All in a nice, slim, black casing. The 320 and 340 also support HP's RET (Resolution Enhancement Technology) for higher dpi printing and print quality. The battery allegedly lasts up to 4 hours, but I'm inclined to take that figure with a grain of salt. The 340's a pretty recent model (on sale in 1998 and the current 350's only an update), so it might be worth considering.

One more thing: be careful buying second-hand portable printers. Like PowerBooks and PC notebooks, they may travel rough and they're more likely to get dusty. I've encountered a well-kept HP 340 recently (2.5 years' old) that died and that was despite a fastidious owner. Portable printers are harder to work on that their desktop inkjet cousins. I tend to recommend the used Apple StyleWriters to people who want portable printing on a budget. Why? Not because they're Apple, but because their overall sturdier design and the relative longevity of the StyleWriter engine (many are still keeping on) means they are more likely to outlast their use-by date.

How about a LocalTalk PostScript printer - like the HP LaserJet 4M or an Apple LaserWriter IIf? How do you get a Lombard, Pismo or iBook to talk to them? No problem. All you need is an Asanté or Farallon LocalTalk-to-Ethernet hardware bridge. Both are still in production and both are readily available on the used market. Depending on whether you're making a direct connection to the printer or through a network, you'll need either an ethernet crossover cable, or a standard cat5 ethernet cable that goes through a hub. Pack a 3 or 6-foot crossover cable; it's more than likely that wherever you're visiting will already have standard cat5 cables readily available. And, if not, you can buy these at a supermarket even.

And while I'm on this, make sure you 'Book's got a copy of Apple Printer Utility [APU] (v.2.2; available in both PowerPC and 68K flavors) or the earlier LaserWriter Utility (v.7.7 preferably). APU's better and more fully-featured. It can talk to printers on AppleTalk whether they're Apple-made or not and you can download fonts and do all sorts of interesting things, like restart the printer from your office on the 44th floor. Forget HP's stupid, useless and slow Printer Utility for Mac. HP have no idea how to write software.

One more thing: another part of the Mac OS install is the Desktop Printer Utility. Kinda useful, Unixy-type folks tell me, as you can (maybe, possibly) set up a laser printer using the LPR protocol if you're connected to a Novell network via Netware for Mac or something. Don't ask me about this. Talk to your local PC admin/Troll about it; s/he'll probably find it a fascinating concept.
PostScript (Level 2400)

A number of kind and thoughtful PowerBook users mailed me regarding my previous article suggesting what internal bodily use I might make of a large Macintosh Portable after I left the PowerBook 2400 off my Top 10 list.

Foul! We demand a recount! screamed the hordes of PB2400 afficionados. Fair enough. Critic criticise thyself. Or, in this case, I'll justify myself:

1. The 2400 was only available (and serviceable and warrantable) in the US and Japan (not in Australia or any other part of the hemisphere I inhabit).

2. Based on the 3400's PCI architecture, so nothing new there (come on, be honest). The keyboard, yes. Point taken.

3. Was really designed and built by IBM Japan (not that there's anything wrong with that; and yes, I know Sony built the PB100, but Apple really did the design work for it, despite myths to the contrary).

4. So there.

And the worst 'Book? Let me see, that'd have to be the PowerBook 150, wouldn't it? Why? 2-bit screen (literally; 4 shades of murky gray); expensive Duo memory; no ADB port (!); and no video out. Yuk. A dealer offered me one (new) as late as January 1996 for the same price as a Color Classic II (the LCIII-based model). No prizes for guessing which one is the better portable (I bought an LC575 in case you're interested).

And to all you 'Bookers out there, thanks for reading this year and I'll see you in 1901 - er - 2001 (he said optimistically). Drive safely over the New Year. Readers like you are hard to replace.