Canon's Pixma TR150 Wireless Portable Printer ($199.99) is a light and compact color inkjet printer designed primarily for printing color documents on the road. The TR150 replaces the Pixma iP110 Wireless Mobile Printer, an Editors' Choice reviewed here back in June of 2015. Compared to its closest competitors (which include the 2016 HP OfficeJet 200 Mobile Printer and the 2018 HP Tango X—two PCMag top picks from the Palo Alto information technology giant), the TR150 prints well at a relatively good clip and with competitive running costs. Combine these value-added perks, and the Pixma TR150 easily picks up our Editors' Choice nod as 2020's leading portable printer.
As Small and Light as It Gets
Measuring 2.6 by 7.3 by 12.7 inches (HWD) with its trays closed and weighing 4.5 pounds (or 5.1 pounds with the $99.99 battery installed), the Pixma TR150 is identical in size and girth to its iP100 predecessor. It's also less than an inch smaller and a fraction of a pound lighter than the HP OfficeJet 200 and the Epson WorkForce WF-110, while the HP Tango X, the only device here without a battery for untethered operation, is notably bigger in all directions and outweighs the TR150 by a couple of pounds.
Without the optional battery, of course, the printer isn't truly portable, in that you can't power it up without an AC or USB power source. Of the four truly portable devices—the Pixma TR150, Pixma iP110, HP OfficeJet 200, and Epson WF-110—mentioned here, the HP and Epson come with batteries at no extra charge, though, with the WorkForce portable, the company also offers an additional external power pack capable of about 500 prints. (The included battery is preinstalled and not removable.) As mentioned, the TR150's battery will set you back about $100 and, according to Canon, it takes two to three hours to charge.
Unfortunately, the Pixma TR150 does not support auto-duplexing or automatic two-sided printing, but then, neither do the other models discussed here. A unique feature that it does support, though, is the ability to create and save up to five templates, such as applications, consent forms, and flyers, that you can call up and print directly from the printer's control panel.
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HP OfficeJet 200 Mobile Printer
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HP Tango X
Epson WorkForce WF-110 Wireless Mobile Printer
Speaking of the control panel, as you can see in the image below, this one consists of a handful of navigation controls, power and cancel buttons, and a 1.44-inch OLED screen for displaying the drill-down menu structure.
On the rear right edge of the chassis, near the hinge for opening and closing the top cover and paper input tray, you'll find three ports or slots: one for AC power, a USB combination data/power connection, and a Kingston-type locking slot to secure the printer from theft.
Connectivity consists of Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n/a, Wireless PictBridge for printing from compatible Canon digital cameras, and USB 2.0 for printing from a single PC. Canon's Pixma TR150 Wireless Portable Printer Driver provides Wireless Direct (a.k.a. Wi-Fi Direct) for connecting your mobile devices without either them or the printer being part of an intermediary network. (We'll look a little closer at mobile connectivity in the next section.)
Like many of today's Pixmas, the TR150 supports Instagram's square image media sizes—in this case, 3.5 and 5 inches square. (I don't know of any non-Pixma models that support the square format.) Its sole paper tray, which extends upward and outward from the rear of the machine, holds 50 sheets of plain paper up to legal size (8.5 by 14 inches). And Canon rates its maximum monthly duty cycle at 500 prints. That may not sound like much, but 500 prints per month is the same duty cycle as the Tango X, and HP rates the OfficeJet 200 at just 300 pages per month.
Mobile Connectivity, Software, and Voice Activation
For a while now, both the Pixma TR and TS series (business-oriented and photo-centric consumer models, respectively) have come out of the box ready to support a wide variety of both Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. Mobile apps include Apple AirPrint, Canon Print App, Canon Print Service, and Canon Print Plug-In (the last for Amazon Fire support). Also included is Creative Park (a collection of calendars, greeting cards, and other festive templates), the cross-platform Easy PhotoPrint Editor app, Google Cloud Print, and Mopria Print Services.
Another inclusion worth mentioning: Canon's PosterArtist Lite app, which is a pared-down version of the full-blown PosterArtist program that ships with the company's professional photographer imagePrograf printers. PosterArtist Lite comes with over 1,300 poster templates, stock photos, and clipart, as well as advanced color correction and text editing features. It can print from Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, and gives you the option to share poster layouts via your favorite cloud sites.
As with most of today's Canon, HP, and Epson consumer printers, you also get the ability to print from your smart home appliances, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and any other service—including Windows' Cortana, Apple's Siri, and Samsung's Bixby—that supports If This, Then That (IFTTT) scripting technology.
Between the Pixma TR150's ability to store and print templates and its voice activation, printing critical documents on the road just got a whole lot easier.
Printing Is Slow Going, Though
Canon rates the TR150's throughput at 9 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome pages and 5.5ppm for color prints. Those ratings are—after hooking it up via USB to our standard Intel Core i5 PC running Windows 10 Pro—just a tenth or two of a ppm short of my real-world results.
The Pixma printed our 12-page Microsoft Word text document at 8.9ppm. The HP Tango X proved about 0.7ppm faster, while the Epson WF-110 came in about 3.7ppm slower. (The OfficeJet 200 and Pixma iP110 were tested with a different regimen and suite of test documents, so I can't compare their print speeds.)
Next, I clocked the TR150 as it printed our several colorful graphics- and photo-laden PDFs, some Excel spreadsheets and full-page charts and graphs, and a few full-page PowerPoint handouts. I then combined those results with the scores from the text document test to arrive at an overall speed of 5.2ppm, which beat both the Tango X and WF-110 by over 3ppm. And that can seem like an eternity, if you're sitting there waiting with a would-be client or customer.
Finally, I completed my tests by timing the TR150 as it churned out our colorful and detailed 4-by-6-inch snapshots. It averaged about 50 seconds per print, which fell between the HP's 46 seconds and the Epson's 1 minute and 20 seconds.
Output Worth Waiting For
The TR150 and its ilk are slow, but at least what rolls out of the output slot is worth waiting for—especially graphics and photos. Some of the smaller text (say, 10 points and lower) I printed was slightly misshapen and not quite up to laser quality, though it was plenty legible enough. Mostly it displayed issues, such as somewhat imprecise kerning and leading (the spacing between certain letters and letter pairs), that only document designers and desktop publishers would really care about.
Otherwise, the gradients and fills in our Excel graphics and PowerPoint handouts, as well as the details and color accuracy in our test photos, came out better than you might expect from such a small imaging device.
Running Costs: About What You’d Expect
Low-volume devices like these cost a lot to use—and that's that. The saving grace is that, if you don't print a lot, you won't spend a lot on ink. Right? Well, not exactly.
I estimated the TR150's running costs at 7.5 cents for monochrome pages and 15.1 cents per color page. If you were to max it out at its 500-color-page monthly rating, you would spend just over $75 on ink each month—and that's for an ISO (International Organization for Standardization) coverage of approximately 20 percent per page. If you print large photos or graphics-laden pages that use a lot of ink, your running costs would soar significantly higher.
In any case, the TR150's per-page costs are competitive for this class of printer. The Epson WF-110's running costs, for example, are 9 cents for black pages and 18 cents for color, with the HP OfficeJet 200's figures only a fifth of a cent lower. In fact, of all these compact printers, only the Tango X delivers relatively low consumables costs. That is only when you opt for HP's Instant Ink subscription program, though: 3.5 cents per page, whether monochrome or color, when you subscribe to the 300-pages-per-month plan.
Also, the Tango doesn't come with or offer a battery for untethered operation. Using that criterion, it's not truly a portable.
A Long-Overdue Refresh
Though it's not necessarily a ground-breaking upgrade, the Pixma TR150's voice-activated printing and storable templates, as well as a few other less notable updates, are significant enough to nudge this category back into the backpacks and briefcases of today's business travelers. Most of its competitors, except for perhaps the HP Tango X and recently updated Epson WF-110, have grown a bit long in the tooth since their last overhaul.
For its part, the Tango X is too big and lacks the ability to run without a plugged-in power source, and the Epson's running costs render it far too expensive to use for more than 100 or so pages each month. Granted, I'm not wild about the seemingly exorbitant $99.99 list price of the TR150's optional battery, which pushes the printer's overall cost up to $300, but I suspect it will come down before too long. Portable, compact technology tends to run on the expensive side, anyway, and with that in mind, Canon's new Pixma TR150 is an excellent choice for our latest favorite portable inkjet color printer.
The portable, single-function Canon Pixma TR150 prints well (especially graphics and photos), making it a good choice for home offices and families.
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