W
e thought thermal paper was dead
and buried along with mimeo-
graph paper, but look out, it’s back!
Folks who are nostalgic for the ’80s
can get their curly thermal-paper fix
with Planon’s portable PrintStik printer.
Designed for road warriors, the PrintStik is
a self-contained, battery-powered portable
thermal printer. It’s small enough to fit in
your bag, and if your expectations are low
enough, it does the job. How low? It’s a
gray-scale thermal printer, so you won’t be
printing color graphics with it.
About the only thing it’s good for is
printing directions or a legal contract that
you need signed right that freaking minute.
You certainly wouldn’t use it to print a
resume—unless you’re trying really hard not
to get that job.
The PrintStik charges via a standard USB
port and will churn out about 30 pages on
a charge—10 more pages than the printer
can hold. Thermal paper is usually cheap,
but not with the PrintStik. Planon charges
$25 for three 20-page rolls, which is pretty
steep pricing given the output quality. We
thought about simply refilling the printerwith generic thermal paper, but Planon has
you there: The rolls are integrated into a
cartridge, so you’re stuck buying from the
company. Thanks, Planon.
The printer can connect to a device
via USB or Bluetooth. The latter could be
used for connecting to a phone, but only
BlackBerry drivers are currently available—
Planon says it will add other phone types.
We tried to print from our Bluetooth-
enabled notebook PC but failed. We can’t
necessarily blame Planon; if you can actu-
ally get something that’s Bluetooth-based to
work, you should either buy a lottery ticket
or steer clear of lightning storms. Success
with the wireless standard is that rare.
Unfortunately for Planon, the USB
installation wasn’t much better. We had to
repeatedly cycle the power button on the
printer to get it to work. We finally gave
up on one machine and moved to another
with the same result. Just as we were about
to fling the PrintStik against the wall, the
blasted thing started to work properly—on
both machines.
To sum up, what you get is curly, mono-
chrome output with terrible graphics repro-duction in an expensive, albeit tiny, printer.
To us, that’s just not a winning proposition.
We do acknowledge that it has some utility
for an extremely small set of users. For those
people, it certainly is better than writing
something out longhand, but for the rest of
us, it might be better to just break out the
Ticonderoga No. 2. –G O R D O N M A H U N GPlanon PrintStik PS910
For emergency use only
The PrintStik is like a teleportation
device back to the 1980s.
VERDICT$300, http://www.planon.com4
Small; useful in dire
printing emergen-
cies.Expensive refills,
pathetic graphics
output, pricey.TINY BONHAMPLANON PRINTSTIK PS910TINY TIMREVIEWS OF THE LATEST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE
IN THE LABhttp://www.maximumpc.com|NOV 08 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC| 93