For people that travel a lot for business having small devices such as a portable scanner printer would allow them to work wherever they were currently located. There are several small models of printers that can be used for travel purposes. However, there are not any machines that combine both the scanner and printer into one small device. You will find a few portable handheld scanner units that you can buy and use as a separate item with the portable printer. Most of the scanners designed to be portable are extremely small. Some come as an all in one device that you pull across the paper or document to scan.
You can transfer the images from the scanner to your laptop and then print them out. Both units are small enough to fit inside a medium sized suitcase or travel case to make them easy to transport. You can find the handheld scanner in a design that resembles a pen. These extremely small units generally come with a memory card for storage of information. They also use a wireless system that plugs into the USB port on your laptop or desktop computer. The types of small printers available are not quite as small as the scanners, but still require much less room then a full size machine. The type of small printer you purchase depends on what you need to use it for.
While the scanners that are portable can usually work with both images and printed materials, some of the printers do not. Some of the smaller units only print in black and white so if you need to make color copies you want a machine that is capable of printing in color. If you specialize in photo printing and want a portable scanner printer, you will find some small machines that are designed specifically for printing photos and images. You should also look at the type of paper the unit is capable of using. Some can only take the general card stock size and not a full size 11 by 8 paper.
