When you have to print on the road, or from your mobile office, you need a compact portable printer that won’t let you down. Luckily there’s lots of printers small enough to take with you when you travel and you’ll find four of the best right here.
As senior printer editor, I’ve tested over two hundred of the best home printers and best small business printers, and that includes some excellent portable printers from the likes of Brother, Canon, Epson and HP. This guide gives you their vital statistics and a brief review for each entry. You can click through to the full reviews for more detail.
For my in-depth evaluations, I’ll spend two days comparing everything from design and build, to usability and, of course, price and print quality, before giving each product its overall rating. All of the products on this list have their strengths, but my pick for the best portable printer overall is the Epson WorkForce WF-110. For me it has the right features at the right price and it works well when you’re trying to print in transit.
Best portable printer overall
✅ You need high quality prints while you travel. This is effectively a miniaturised desktop inkjet printer, so you can expect the same strong image resolution and performance.
✅ You also print photos on the go. This little printer can handle glossy photo paper delivers bold bright images.
❌ You plan to use this as your main printer. The small cartridges don’t hold much ink and the cost per page is less competitive than a desktop printer.
❌ You print long documents. With no auto-duplex mode, reloading each sheet of paper to print the reverse side is fiddly and time consuming.
I have to applaud Epson for distilling all the elements of a good desktop printer into something small enough to fit in a briefcase. Once I had the four smaller-than-usual ink cartridges installed, the Epson WorkForce WF-110 was easy to operate and worked a charm.
It’s using pigment ink instead of dye-based ink to deliver smudge-resistant pages up to 5,760 x 1,440 dpi. The results look crisp and colorful on all kinds of media including coated photo paper. The plastic casing is textured for improved grip, and when unfolded, the plastic body becomes the paper input tray, which can hold up to twenty sheets of letter-sized plain paper.
The lithium-ion battery can be fast charged with the bundled charger or more slowly by connecting the supplied USB cable to any powered USB port. With a top speed of 7ppm, the Epson WorkForce WF-110 prints slowly and, unsurprisingly, there’s no auto-duplex mode. For fully mobile wireless printing, however, the quality and convenience are hard to beat.
Read our full Epson WorkForce WF-110 review
Best portable laser printer
✅ You move from office to office and want to take a printer with you. At 8lb, this is the smallest and lightest laser printer around.
✅ You print a lot when you travel. Being a laser printer, the LaserJet Pro M15w is faster to print and cheaper to run than other portable printers.
❌ Your car is your mobile office. Unlike the battery-powered printers on this list, this one needs mains power.
❌ You need to print in color. HP managed to make such a small laser printer by limiting it to a single black cartridge.
Laser printers are usually bigger and heavier than inkjets, but this is the world’s smallest and it’ll easily fit in your cabin luggage.
It’s also the cheapest because HP has stripped this monochrome print-only device to the bone. There’s no auto-duplex mode and no display, but it does have inbuilt Wi-Fi and I found printing via the HP Smart app especially easy. It runs on mains power rather than a battery as laser printing requires more energy.
The advantage, however, is a rapid print rate and consistently crisp pages of text on any size paper up to letter or A4. With the input and output trays fold away neatly, the footprint is only a little larger than a sheet of letter paper, and it stands no taller than the average smartphone.
Much of the internal space is taken up by the single black toner which costs around £45 (US$50, AU$80), so your on-going print cost works out around 4.5p per page, which beats all other portable printers.
Read our full HP LaserJet Pro M15w review
Best portable printer for photos
✅ You want to print photos on holiday. This mini photo printer is small enough to fit in your luggage and the power pack allows it to work anywhere.
✅ The 4x6-inch photo is your favorite format. That’s the same as 10x15cm and it’s a popular choice for snaps. It’s also the only size that fits.
❌ You print a lot. HP’s tiny ink cartridges and specialized paper mean the CPP (cost per print) is rather high.
❌ You want a battery-powered printer. This one requires mains power, unless you buy the optional powerbank charger, which is not widely available.
The largest printer in HP’s Sprocket range of portable printers is the Studio, which ditches ZINK for an inkjet-based system using dye-sublimation to transfer layers of colors onto special 4x6-inch photo paper.
It didn’t fit into my largest pocket and it requires an optional power bank accessory or mains power to operate, but it’s still impressively small and so well designed that I found it a pleasure to use. You can connect your smartphone to the printer using Bluetooth and use HP’s intuitive way to find photos to print from your social media feeds and edit them using Photoshop-style tools.
The projecting paper tray gives it an asymmetric shape and the finish is an attractive grey with green flecks. Load up some paper and the Studio prints slowly, but effectively, giving pleasing 4x6-inch (10x15cm) snaps.
For your dollar, you also get an ink cartridge and 10 sheets of photo paper. Additional cartridges and printing sheets are sold together, setting you up with an extra 80 sheets and two ink cartridges. That works out to be about 44c / 45p / 74c (AUD) per page, so it’s not the most economical way to print, but it is both fun and practical.
Read our full HP Sprocket Studio review
Best pocket-sized portable printer
✅ You need to print documents while on business trips. This printer is so small, it really can fit in a suit pocket and it has no problem printing letter or A4-size documents.
✅ You want to print from foreign countries. With a battery pack and USB charger included, you can print on the plane and you won’t need to worry about mains socket adapters at your destination.
❌ You need to print in color. This printer is only compatible with thermal paper, which can only give a black imprint.
❌ You want to print photos. As well as being monochrome only, the image resolution is not good enough for photography.
By using inkless thermal print technology, which relies on fewer moving parts, Brother has reduced this portable printer to the size of a small baguette. I was quite comfortable carrying it in my jacket pocket. What’s more, the only consumable you need is the special thermal paper itself, making this pocket-sized device perfect for taking on the road or carrying onto a plane.
It comes with a power adapter and battery pack so that you can use it anywhere and charge from your laptop, and while Wi-Fi is built in, you don’t need to rely on finding a network to connect with your device because it also offers Wi-Fi Direct and a mini USB port.
It prints quickly enough, with the black and white pages emerging as sharp and detailed as any laser printer.
This printer will serve you well if you're primarily printing text. But if you want color or complex graphics, you'll want to explore other portable options.
How to choose the best portable printers for you
Before buying a new portable printer, consider these key questions…
Inkjet, laser or thermal?
Most printers that are small enough to be called portable are inkjets because of their ability to print high-resolution images on a wide variety of media including coated photo paper. If you want high-quality photos, this is the technology for you. Laser printing is faster and toner is usually cheaper than ink, but it’s harder to shrink laser technology, so there’s only one portable laser printer that I’ve come across. The truly pocket-size printers tend to use thermal print technology because being inkless enables them to be much smaller and simpler devices. They rely on specialist thermal paper which gives you lower image quality, but also quite satisfying and very practical prints.
Monochrome or color?
Monochrome portable printers are more common and can be smaller and significantly cheaper to buy and run. If you need to print in color, portable inkjets give the best results, but be prepared to pay a premium for their miniature ink cartridges.
Printing from various locations, or in transit?
This comes down to choosing between mains powered and battery powered printers. If you have access to a mains socket and a suitable power adapter, there are plenty of printers that are small enough to take with you. For printing on the hoof, however, you’ll need a battery powered pocket printer.
What features do I need?
Does it have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, or both? Other useful portable features are AirPrint compatibility, a battery pack, USB charging, an inbuilt display and a carry case.
What’s my budget?
The best cheap printers that are also desktop printers may be small enough to consider portable and these offer the best value. Ultra-portable printers are more specialist and therefore tend to be more expensive.
Have a preferred brand? We’ve tested, reviewed, and rated the best Epson printers, best HP printers and the best Brother printers.
How we test the best portable printers
I’ve been the senior printer editor at TechRadar Pro long enough to have tested hundreds of printers of all shapes and sizes including some that are small enough to consider portable. My methodology follows a series of repeatable tests and comparisons and the process starts right from the unboxing and initial set-up, which is timed. If there’s a problem with unsustainable packaging or a baffling user manual, I’ll call it. If it’s a pleasure to use, that’ll be reflected in the final score too. I always test both wired and wireless connections and explore the various remote printing companion apps as these often enhance the user experience.
For the performance tests, I have a folder of test cards, photos and text documents designed to assess detail resolution, contrast, color accuracy and gamut. Some test images are particularly good for spotting feathering and smearing among inkjets, while others highlight color blocking and banding in laser prints. For portable printers, I also want to know how long the battery lasts and how easy it is to use on the go. A ten-page text document is useful for measuring print rates because I never take manufacturer's claims at face value. Having said that, the quoted print and scan speeds are usually accurate enough that I rarely contradict them.
I print each test page on a range of standard paper stock from cheap 75gsm sheets to 600gsm card, as every printer has its limits and preferences when it comes to paper quality. And if the manual claims you can print on envelopes, labels or t-shirts, I test that too.
Features such as auto-duplex scanning or copying multi-page documents via an ADF (automatic document feed) are evaluated, and an assessment of build quality and design contributes to the overall rating. I pay particular attention to the COO (cost of ownership) because cheap printers can often give lower value for money when you calculate the ongoing consumables cost.
Find out more about our process in How we test, review and rate printers on TechRadar Pro.
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