The 6-pound 350CBi can supply the hard copy users occasionally need while on the road or in the field. There are two inkjet cartridges, one for black and one for three-chamber color. The printer accepts only one cartridge at a time, however, so output is either black or full color. The problem with this arrangement is that the color cartridge blends magenta, cyan and yellow inks to render black areas, which as a result look more like dark gray than true black. The maximum resolution is 600 by 300 dots per inch.
Speed ranges from one to five pages per minute, depending on the document.
Printed photographs and art won't win awards, and the printer won't win a race, but the DeskJet 350CBi does a pretty good job overall. If you won't need that many pages while traveling, you could leave the AC plug in the office and reduce the carrying weight. Some fine-tuning needs to be done on the infrared adapter, which makes the DeskJet 350CBi the ultimate portable printer. I finally gave up trying to make Microsoft Windows 98 understand that a printer was installed on my notebook PC's infrared port. HP ought to include a wizard within the drivers to automatically look for the infrared port.