The Disadvantages of Owning a Portable Printer Scanner

Owning gadgets like portable printer scanners certainly has its benefits. It is basically the reason why people purchase gadgets, so they can get the benefits that the gadget has to offer. However, purchasing some of these gadgets sometimes has its price. We’re not referring to the cost of a portable printer scanner. We are referring to the disadvantages of buying them. You may want to go all out buying the first of these gadgets you see but it is important to make an informed decision so that it will be a good investment.

To start with, let us go with the advantages of owning a portable printer scanner. The main advantage of buying one is that, for a price of one equipment, you get to own a machine that can both print and scan. Since it’s portable, you can take it wherever you want. This sums up all the advantages of having this gadget. However, for purposes of discussion, we will go through the disadvantages that will make you want to think twice about buying one. It is important to know beforehand all about owning one, otherwise you’ll only be wasting your time and money.

Every coin has two sides. If having these printers has its advantages, having them too has its disadvantages. The primary disadvantage of owning one of these gadgets is that they are not cheap. Although they won’t cost more than purchasing a printer and scanner separately, you can expect that these gadgets cost more than ordinary desktop printers did, since not a lot of them exist in the market.

Another disadvantage of having this one machine compared to owning two separate gadgets for printing and scanning is that you can use it for doing one thing at a time. If you have a separate printer for printing and another scanner for scanning, then you can do printing and scanning jobs simultaneously. You cannot do this with a portable printer scanner. Most portable printer scanners use the same slot to scan as well as print documents. If we take the Canon BJC 85 for example, you need to replace the ink cartridge with an image scanner cartridge. Some multifunctional printers may be able to print and scan at the same time but there is no portable model yet that is capable of doing both.

For now, one disadvantage of buying a portable printer scanner is a large step down to buying portable printers or portable scanners. So far, the portable printer scanner model that is manufactured by one of the top printer companies can only print up to a maximum of 5 pages per minute. Compared to the latest mobile printers that can reach up to 20ppm, this is a huge step down. Not only that, the scanning resolution is much better for specialized scanners since they don’t have to sacrifice quality for their size. This leads us to another disadvantage.

Because of cramming up two equipments into one, not to mention keeping it in a portable package, these equipments lose some features that we may find very useful. Some of these features are duplex printing, great paper handling or heavy-duty printing. Owning this kind of multifunctional gadget has its disadvantages, which is why you need to weigh whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.