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

To begin with, let’s go with the advantages of owning a portable scanner printer. The main advantage of buying one is that for the price of a computer, you can have a machine that can print and scan. Since it is portable, you can take it wherever you want. This sums up all the advantages of having this gadget. However, for discussion purposes, we will go over the cons that will make you want to think twice before buying one. It is important to know everything about having one in advance, otherwise you will only be wasting your time and money.

Each corner has two sides. If having these printers has its advantages, having them also has its disadvantages. The main disadvantage of having one of these devices is that they are not cheap. Although they won’t cost more than buying a separate printer and scanner, you can expect these devices to cost more than regular desktop printers, since there aren’t many on the market.

Another disadvantage of having this machine compared to having two separate devices for printing and scanning is that you can use it to do one thing at a time. If you have a separate printer to print to and another scanner to scan from, you can run print and scan jobs simultaneously. You cannot do this with a portable printer scanner. Most portable printer scanners use the same slot to scan and print documents. If we take the Canon BJC 85 for example, you should replace the ink cartridge with an image scanner cartridge. Some all-in-ones can print and scan at the same time, but there’s still no portable model that can do both.

For now, one disadvantage of buying a portable printer scanner is a big step down from buying portable printers or portable scanners. Until now, the portable printer scanner model made by one of the major printer companies can only print up to a maximum of 5 pages per minute. Compared to the latest mobile printers that can go up to 20 ppm, this is a big step down. Not only that, the scan resolution is much better for specialized scanners as they don’t have to sacrifice quality for size. This brings us to another disadvantage.

By cramming two computers into one, not to mention keeping it in a portable package, these computers lose some features that can be very useful to us. Some of these features are duplex printing, excellent paper handling, or high-resistance printing. Owning this type of all-in-one has its downsides, so you need to weigh whether the pros outweigh the cons.