Portable A5 printer for plates?

[CaptCrispy]

Anyone know of a small portable A5 printer for printing plates, PLOGs, etc. on the go? And to work with iPad, skydemon.

[SteveC]

I have a Sipix thermal printer for sale.

[GrahamB]

I think you'll find the AIP plates linked to through SD are all A4.

Most of them will be pretty difficult to read shrunk to A5.

[Rob P]

Duplex printing?

[Keef]

I have a small, old, Canon portable battery-powered printer (and a mains power supply for it). It's travelled Europe and the USA with me, but I don't use it these days. It's free to anyone who wants it who'll collect it (either from Suffolk, or at a curry or a fly-in sometime/somewhere). There are some ink cartridges with it. It'll do colour if you put in a colour cartridge, but I never bothered.

[Seasider]

Download the page you wish to print and take a picture on the iPad thus not requiring of a printer.
Part of my pre-planning is to record any relevant plates for the mission in this way

[GrahamB]

I think the point is that the OP wants a paper backup. SD can display and save the plates from within the application.

[Seasider]

Just pointing out that I save the plates on the iPad photo app should the
SD (or in my case,the excellent Runway HD) go down .

[CaptCrispy]

As GrahamB said the idea is for a total paper backup, not only plates, but also my own short documents stored on iPad.

[peterh337]

There are no A5 printers on the market at present AFAIK. There used to be but all ended about 5-7 years ago.

There are A6 printers, mostly photo printers using special paper and of no use for flying.

The best portable printer is perhaps the Canon IP90 and its successors e.g. IP100.
http://www.peter2000.co.uk/aviation/crete2/laptop.jpg
This is A4, plain paper. Works great, is very light, cartridges are not cheap and don't do many pages. I have a pic somewhere in my trip writeups, as I used to carry one with me, leaving it in the boot in case it's needed and on recent trips it thankfully never was. It can be found in a battery powered version (not so light) and even with bluetooth (avoids the printer cable...). I used it a lot when I was doing the IR in the USA, and on some European trips.

My current approach is to print everything potentially needed at home (maybe a 1" stack for a trip all the way down to Greece; no big deal) and then rely on the Ipad as the display device for PDFs generated at short notice.

[CaptCrispy]

Thanks Peter, I'll look into this when I am back home.

[stevelup]

None of the suggestions above are iPad friendly which was one of your requirements?

Currently, your only remotely portable choice is the HP H470 with a wireless dongle. This will print using the free HP ePrint App, but not AirPrint.

Quite a long way from ideal, but it does work.

[peterh337]

There are some 3rd party printing solutions for the Ipad which don't involve Airprint.

In my quest for even printing to a PDF I have bought and downloaded a number of apps, most of which basically didn't work, either because most other Ipad apps did not see the "printer" or the generated PDF was duff (e.g. no margins so obviously a Beta 0.0 hack).

I played with a product called PrintBureau. It is a truly clunky piece of c r a p, which due to the IOS functionality restrictions it contains a built-in email client (which you need to retrieve emails with if you want to print them, and which obviously needs to be configured for your email accounts), and contains a built-in browser (which you need to view web pages with if you want to print them), etc. But it does work, sort of, and I have been able to print stuff to a printer at home, over a wifi connection. I think one can also send a PDF to it from some other apps. Even now, several updates later, the printed font size and type is fairly random though as are colours and image size in any colour prints They offer a better way of printing but it involves running a piece of server software on your home PC, which obviously isn't going to be available when you are doing this for real (travelling).

I don't think Apple ever intended anybody to do that 20th century activity called printing (even to a PDF) and are now roughly where Windows was in 1991 (Windows for Workgroups ).

Major corporate users have access to slicker printing solutions; I guess one can do something decent over Citrix.

[pb6797]

There speaks a man who's never had to support Citrix