1. Open the Settings app and tap Accessibility.


2. Under "Physical and Motor," tap Touch.


3. Tap Haptic Touch.


4. Select from Fast, Default, and Slow. Note that when you select a speed, you can test it using the flower image on the same screen.

Is “Fix It First” at the heart of your transportation department’s strategy? In the first of a series of blog posts titled ‘Rethinking Authorization,’ Transportation for America argues that the federal government should direct transportation funding in ways that prioritize maintenance and repair over new roadways and capacity-expanding projects.

A new approach is urgently needed—one that makes fixing existing infrastructure a prerequisite before building anything new. How are we going to do that?

T4A’s proposal “focuses on the changes required to prioritize existing maintenance needs before building new things: require grantees of federal funding to maintain their infrastructure by setting targets for improving road and bridge conditions, and then hold them accountable for doing so.” They also call for assisting states that fail to hit their targets by directing funds to repair projects only.

T4A suggests that all states should set progressive targets for improving their roadways and bridges, including those that are not currently under federal oversight, create more transparency in their processes, and enact incentives for prioritizing repair and maintenance. To do this, T4A recommends changing federal matching rates to 80 percent for repair and maintenance projects and only 50 percent for capacity-expanding projects. “If you can’t improve the condition of your existing infrastructure, you should not be building more.”

• Fix It First
• Maintenance and Repair
• Aging Infrastructure
• Federal Funding
• Surface Transportation Program
• Infrastructure Funding

I don’t know about you, but I’m someone with a bad habit of misplacing my phone, losing the remote, and forgetting my glasses on top of my head. This bad habit has led to a number of Uber cancellations, missed flights, and perhaps even an argument or two about my tardiness to events. If you’re anything like me, let’s be honest with each other, we can’t keep living like this.

The solution? Fortunately, I have that figured out. Since investing in a MagTap Ultra Slim Tracker Card, I haven’t lost my keys, wallet, or phone in months! And now’s your chance to try it out for a low, low price of $23.99 (reg. $59.99). 

The MagTag tracker is a sleek and reliable device that can easily be discreetly integrated into various items and accessories, such as wallets, backpacks, luggage, and more. It’s even designed with a keyring hole, so you can attach it to your keys or a work lanyard. Plus, it offers real-time tracking anywhere in the world, so you can follow your items from Apple’s Find My app.

Once, I almost forgot my wallet at the TSA—luckily, I had a MagTag. I got an alert before I walked too far away. Its instant updates and loud location beeping make it hard to truly forget anything these days.

I don’t even have to worry about charging it, either. A single charge can last up to 5 months, and it connects to any Qi wireless charger.

All my days spent stressing over where my things were are over. Now, that extra time is spent getting a few more minutes of shuteye. So, join me and bask in the glory of always knowing where your valuables are. Grab a MagTap Ultra Slim Tracker Card for $23.99 (reg. $59.99) while supplies last.

StackSocial prices subject to change. 

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MagTag Ultra Slim Tracker Card – Works with Apple Find My App

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The post Constantly losing things? This $24 tracker might help appeared first on Popular Science.

The shared e-scooter industry is booming in Europe, reports David Zipper for Bloomberg CityLab. “The tiny devices have found a niche, particularly in places where many trips are short, tourists are abundant, and car use is cumbersome and expensive.” Scooters, particularly rentals users don’t have to park or store themselves, offer a convenient, efficient way to travel across urban neighborhoods.

But not all cities are equally enthused: Paris, Madrid, and Malta have banned shared e-scooters, while many Europeans perceive them as useful only to tourists. In the Netherlands, scooters are banned “because it’s hard to see the upside. Dutch cities already have so many cyclists, and if people riding bikes shifted to e-scooters they would lose the health benefits of biking,” said Karen Vancluysen, the secretary general of POLIS, a network of European city transportation officials that has monitored and researched micromobility deployments across the continent.

According to Vancluysen, “The most common sentiment was, ‘they’re cluttering urban space.’ But that wasn’t really fair, because people didn’t realize that the biggest polluter of public space isn’t a tiny scooter, but a car.” Meanwhile, some officials have suggested charging e-scooter companies for parking areas — though no one has made a similar suggestion for carmakers.

Vancluysen points out that because many European cities already have high rates of walking and cycling, e-scooters have a greater potential to benefit U.S. cities, where most trips are still made by car.

• E-Scooters
• Shared Scooters
• Shared Mobility
• Micromobility

If a Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources proposal to sell hundreds of millions acres of public lands in the West goes through, it could cause irreparable damage to sensitive natural, historical, and cultural sites, warn groups from conservationists to hunters to indigenous communities.

As Andrew McKean explains in Outdoor Life, “The bill, in a section titled ‘Mandatory Disposal of Bureau of Land Management Land and National Forest Service System Land for Housing,’ requires the BLM and Forest Service to ‘select for disposal no less than 0.50 percent and not more than 0.75 percent’ of eligible land for sale. National parks, wildlife refuges, designated wilderness areas, national monuments, and historic sites would be exempt from sale.” A map created by The Wilderness Society illustrates the over 250 million acres eligible for sale under the proposal.

Although the bill purports to make more land available for affordable housing, critics point out that, while some strategic use of federal land could help, much of the land in question is far from existing cities and infrastructure and unsuitable for housing. The bill’s language includes an expansive “associated community needs” provision that could allow for “nearly any purpose,” according to an attorney who analyzed the text.”He says that could include AI data centers, ski areas, golf courses, or consolidation of large ranches.” Meanwhile, the administration has moved to open more public lands to mining, timber, and other extractive industries.

This isn’t a uniquely Western concern. “It doesn’t matter if you live in Bozeman or Baltimore, these lands belong to you,” said an unnamed legislative source who provided details for the story. Actions to defund, shrink, and eliminate national monuments and historic and cultural sites will harm ecosystems, erase key parts of the nation’s history, and make public lands less accessible to all Americans.

• Public Lands
• Bureau of Land Management
• Housing Supply
• Federal Land
• Trump 2.0
• National Forests

Already a popular summer destination, Italy will be even busier this summer since 2025 is a Jubilee year. Millions of people will travel to Rome to participate in this cultural and spiritual celebration. Whether you’re heading to Italy for the Jubilee pilgrimage or a classic Euro summer trip, get the most out of it by connecting with locals in their first language. With Babbel Language Learning, access lessons in 14 languages, including Italian, Spanish, and French. Use the exclusive StackSocial discount code LEARN40 to get lifetime access for only $129.99 (regularly $599).

It can seem intimidating to try to learn a new language before a trip, but Babbel developed its lessons to maximize cognitive benefits. A team of researchers at City University of New York assessed Babbel’s Spanish course and found that “users with no knowledge of Spanish acquired knowledge equivalent to one semester of Spanish in 15 hours.”

Babbel’s bite-sized lessons teach practical vocabulary and phrases in 10-15 minute lessons that you can easily fit into your daily commute, lunch break, or as you wind down before bed. Plus, your progress syncs across all devices, so you can access Babbel on your phone, tablet, or computer without having to repeat lessons. You can even download lessons to access when you’re offline, so you can use your lengthy flight to Italy to brush up before the festivities.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

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Babbel Language Learning: Lifetime Subscription (All Languages)

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In addition to convenient lessons that easily fit into your schedule, Babbel has AI-powered conversation partners that help you test your skills in situations you might come across abroad, without the pressure of talking to a real person. Advanced speech recognition technology also helps to perfect your accent.

Secure a lifetime subscription to all languages with Babbel for just $129.99 with StackSocial’s exclusive code, LEARN40, and get the most out of your international trips this summer.

The post Traveling to Italy during the Jubilee Year? Learn Italian and 13 more languages with Babbel appeared first on Popular Science.

Celebrata il 21 giugno, la Giornata Mondiale

In recent years, researchers and climate advocates have been ringing the alarm about artificial intelligence’s impact on the environment. Advanced and increasingly popular large language models (LLMs)—such as those offered by OpenAI and Google—reside in massive data centers that consume significant amounts of electricity and water to cool servers. Every time someone types a question or phrase into one of these platforms, the energy used to generate a response produces a measurable amount of potentially harmful CO₂. But, according to a new research published in Frontiers in Communication, not all of those prompts leave have the same environmental impact. Not even close. 

The study looked at 14 different LLMs, each varying in the size of their training data, and evaluated their performance using a standardized set of 500 questions across different subject areas. Each model generates a certain number of “thinking tokens” per query, and those tokens correlate with CO₂ emissions. When the researchers compared the responses, they found that more complex “reasoning models”—which have larger training sets and take longer to process and respond—produced significantly more CO₂ than smaller, more efficient “concise models.” In some cases, reasoning models generated up to 50 times the emissions of their more concise counterparts. 

Aside from the models themselves, the amount of CO₂ generated by prompts also varied based on subject matter. More complex or open-ended questions, such as those involving advanced algebra or philosophy, tended to produce a larger carbon output than simpler prompts, like high school history questions. These findings shed further light on the often-overlooked ways AI models contribute to soaring energy consumption.

Related: [AI will require even more energy than we thought]

“The environmental impact of questioning trained LLMs is strongly determined by their reasoning approach, with explicit reasoning processes significantly driving up energy consumption and carbon emissions,” Maximilian Dauner, PhD student at Hochschule München University of Applied Sciences and paper author, said in a statement. 

Reasoning models—sometimes called “thinking models”—refer to large LLMs optimized for solving more complex tasks that require logic, step-by-step breakdowns, or detailed instructions. These models often go by different names. At OpenAI, for example, GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini are considered “generalized” models, while versions like o1 and o3-mini are classified as reasoning models. 

Reasoning models employ what some LLM researchers call “chain-of-thought” processing, allowing them to respond more deliberately than generalized models, which prioritize speed and clarity. The end goal is for reasoning models to generate more human-like responses. The most obvious by-product of that, for anyone who has used these, is that reasoning models take longer to generate answers. 

The researchers found that the reasoning models generated significantly more tokens, which correlate with CO₂ emissions, than the more concise models. (Tokens refer to words or parts of words that are converted into numerical representations the LLM can understand.) 

The testing occurred in two phases. In the first phase, researchers asked the same multiple-choice questions to models. The next, free response phrase, had the models provide written responses. On average, reasoning models generated 543.5 tokens per question, compared to just 37.7 tokens for concise models. The most accurate reasoning model they examined, called “Cogito,” produced three times as much CO₂ as similarly sized models optimized for concise responses. 

“From an environmental perspective, reasoning models consistently exhibited higher emissions, driven primarily by their elevated token production,” the researchers write in the paper. 

While the difference in emissions per individual prompt might seem marginal, it can make a real difference when scaled up. The researchers estimate that asking DeepSeek’s R1 model to answer 600,000 questions would generate roughly the same amount of CO₂ as a round-trip flight from London to New York. By comparison, you could ask the non-reasoning Qwen 2.5 model three times as many questions before reaching the same level of emissions.

Overall, the researchers say that their findings highlight a fundamental trade-off between LLM accuracy and environmental sustainability.

“As model size increases, accuracy tends to improve,” the researchers said. “However, this gain is also linked to substantial growth in both CO₂ emissions and the number of generated tokens.”

The findings come amid a fierce global race among tech companies to develop increasingly advanced AI models. Over the past year alone, Apple has announced plans to invest $500 billion in manufacturing and data centers over the next four years. Similarly, Project Stargate—a joint initiative by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle—has also pledged to spend $500 billion on AI-focused data centers. Researchers warn that this surge in infrastructure could place additional strain on already overburdened energy grids.

AI applications, in particular, play an outsized role in the energy consumption of newer data centers. A recent report in the MIT Technology Review notes that starting around 2017, data centers began incorporating more energy-intensive hardware specifically designed for complex AI computations. Energy use surged after that. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) estimates that data centers supporting advanced AI models could account for up to 9.1 percent of the United States’ total energy demand by the end of the decade—up from approximately 4.4 percent today.

Companies are scrambling to find new ways to meet this growing energy demand. Meta, Google, and Microsoft have all partnered with nuclear power plants to generate more electricity. Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s primary partners, even signed a 20-year agreement to source energy from the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in Pennsylvania, a site once known for the worst reactor accident in U.S. history. 

Meta is also making major investments in geothermal technology as a less fossil fuel–intensive way to generate power. Others, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has said the coming age of AI will require an “energy breakthrough” are investing in experimental nuclear fusion. These investments may help companies make progress, but recent research indicates it’s almost certain that more fossil fuels—namely natural gas—will be needed to fully meet AI’s massive energy demand.

Related: [The future of AI is even more fossil fuels]

That may all sound daunting, but the researchers comparing different types of models say their findings could help empower everyday AI users to take steps to reduce their own carbon impact. If users understand how much more energy-intensive reasoning models are, they may choose to use them more sparingly and rely on concise models for general everyday tasks, such as web searches and answering basic questions.

“If users know the exact CO₂ cost of their AI-generated outputs, such as casually turning themselves into an action figure, they might be more selective and thoughtful about when and how they use these technologies,” Dauner said.

The post Certain AI prompts generate 50x more CO₂ than others appeared first on Popular Science.

The idea of having a portable printer may seem unnecessary at a time when most important documents can be easily scanned, signed, and sent digitally. However, having a printer that won’t take up much space is still incredibly valuable for those few times each year when you need a hard copy of an important contract or item for your tax return. Portable printers also come in handy if you’d like to have physical copies of your most precious/incriminating photos instead of leaving them on your phone or social media sites. While smaller than full-sized printers, many of our recommendations have similar specs, including the ability to print wirelessly from your smartphone or computer. If you get a battery-powered model, you can even literally bring it with you to print anywhere, though the use cases for this are admittedly very limited. The best portable printers—like our best overall, the Canon PIXMA TR160—will be there when you need them, but out of sight when you don’t.

• Best overall: Canon PIXMA TR160
• Best splurge: HP OfficeJet 250
• Best for photos: HP Sprocket Studio Plus
• Best ultra-portable: HP Sprocket Panorama
• Best battery-powered: Epson WorkForce WF-110
• Best budget: KODAK Step Wireless Mobile Photo Mini Color Printer

Our portable printer recommendations are based on a mix of hands-on testing and research. We evaluated printers based on their overall size and whether they were designed for mixed use (printing anything) or a specific use case (printing photos). You’ll have to accept the limitations of portable printers—slower print speeds and limited page size support chief among them—but these downsides are mitigated by how convenient they are to use. Our recommendations support wireless printing (a must-have feature for any printer as far as we’re concerned), and there’s even a model that can print and scan documents and photos.

There’s nothing like the tactile feel of printed photos, whether you need them for work, like playing human photobooth at a party, or just want to share vacation shoots quickly. Prepared to print from locations both near and far? These portable printers cover a wide range of use cases and price points.

CANON

• Full-sized prints
• Can run on battery power
• Compact & durable design

• So-so for photo printing

• Size: 12.7 x 7.3 x 2.6 inches
• Weight: 4.5 pounds
• Battery power: Yes (Optionally)
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi, USB

Canon’s PIXMA TR160 is the updated version of our previous top pick (the Canon PIXMA TR150), and it retains everything we liked about the earlier generation while adding a few niceties. This inkjet can still print full-sized documents and photos up to 9 ppm B&W/5.5 ppm color, hold up to 50 sheets of paper at a time, and be set up and operated directly from the printer itself without the need for an app. The TR160 supports the latest version of Apple’s AirPrint wireless printing standard, as well as the Canon PRINT app, and Mopria’s Print Service, which allows you to print items stored in the cloud. 

The 1.44-inch screen is now a monochrome OLED display rather than an LCD, so it’ll look nicer. Most importantly, you can still connect this printer to an optional battery pack to operate it remotely. Canon opted to retain the five-color hybrid ink system of the TR150, so expect perfect-looking text, but printed photos that may appear slightly muted. We’re also disappointed that this newer printer doesn’t support dual-sided printing, which would have given it an even greater advantage over its competition. 

That said, this is still the most fully featured portable printer you can get, especially for its price. The Canon PIXMA TR160 is small enough to fit in a bag, but powerful enough to replace a full-sized printer completely.

Brandt Ranj / Popular Science

• All-in-printer
• Print size legend
• Color touch screen

• Not as portable as other recommendations

• Size: 14.96 x 7.8 x 3.6 inches
• Weight: ‎6.51 pounds
• Battery power: Yes
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi, USB

If you can get over its $400 price tag, you won’t find a more feature-complete portable printer than HP’s OfficeJet 250. Setting up the OfficeJet 250 only took a few minutes and didn’t require us to download the HP Smart mobile app, though you have the option to use that software if you’d prefer. Instead, we opted to use the OfficeJet 250’s touchscreen to input our Wi-Fi password and run through any initial calibrations. We experienced no technical hiccups with this printer after its initial setup. It maintained a solid connection to our Wi-Fi network and was always recognized by multiple computers running macOS. The OfficeJet 250 is larger and heavier than our other recommendations, but this is also the only model that can scan and copy in addition to printing.

The OfficeJet 250 printed up to nine pages of text or one full-sized color image per minute in our tests. That’s speedy for a printer that isn’t plugged into a wall, and especially impressive given that it creates 8.5 x 11-inch prints just like a traditional all-in-one office printer would. Text looked sharp, and we were especially pleased with the quality of our color print, which was vibrant even on regular printer paper. It may not be called out as a photo printer, but the OfficeJet 250 can be used that way in a pinch—though we recommend having proper photo paper on hand. While we opted to test the printer using 8 x 11.5-inch prints, you can adjust the OfficeJet 250 to accommodate B5, A5, and 4 x 6-inch printer paper.

The photos and documents we scanned looked very good, and only took a few seconds to show up on our computer. You can use HP’s scanning software, but we opted to use the Preview app that comes pre-loaded on macOS. Our scans weren’t quite at the same level as HP’s premium home printers, but that’s to be expected given its more compact size. The only technical feature we found ourselves missing when using this printer was double-sided printing. Outside of that missing feature, we could happily use the HP OfficeJet 250 as our only printer. If you’ve wanted an all-in-one printer but have limited desk space, travel between a couple of offices, or even want to take a personal printer with you when working abroad, HP’s OfficeJet 250 is worth its high cost.

• Impressive print quality
• Clever compact design
• Fast prints

• Requires an A/C adapter

• Size: 5.45 x 8.5 x 3.9 inches
• Weight: 3 pounds
• Battery power: No
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi

We chose HP’s Sprocket Studio Plus as the best portable photo printer and stand by that recommendation here. The Studio Plus’ design feels well thought out, especially its print tray, which sits on top of the printer and then attaches to the front with a satisfying click when you’re ready to print. A trio of LEDs on its front side indicates whether it’s powered on, connected to Wi-Fi, and encountered a problem when printing. All three functions are helpful to see at a glance.

Setting up and managing the printer requires HP’s Sprocket App, which is available on iOS and Android. Once installed, it’ll find and connect your device to the printer over Wi-Fi. You have the option to give the Sprocket app access to your entire photo library or a selection of your favorite shots. Printing on the Sprocket Studio Plus is refreshingly straightforward. You’ll begin by placing the included photo paper inside the printer’s print tray and clicking it in front of the printer’s body. Then, select a photo from the Sprocket app and hit print. The printer will pop out a 4×6 in under a minute.

The Sprocket Studio Plus’ compact size is its biggest strength—It’s easy to take the photo printer to a party and have people send prints to it as mementos, but you will be limited to 4×6 prints. That’s a common size for photos, and the Sprocket Studio Plus is easy to stash in a bag when you go on a trip, but you won’t have the option to print an 8 x 10. That’s not a dealbreaker, and we can still highly recommend picking one up. If it’s photos you’re most interested in printing, this is your best value.

It’s also worth noting that this is a dye-sublimation printer, which doesn’t use traditional ink; therefore, the prints won’t smudge if you pick them up immediately after they’re finished.

• Solid color reproduction
• Wide aspect ratio
• Bluetooth connectivity

• Very small prints

• Size: 5.5 x 3.25 x 3.13 inches
• Weight: 1 pound
• Battery power: Yes
• Connectivity: Bluetooth

HP’s Sprocket Panorama has most of the features we liked about Studio Plus, but in a significantly smaller form factor. Setting up the Sprocket Panorama requires downloading the HP Sprocket app, allowing you to pair the printer with your iOS or Android device over Bluetooth. Bluetooth allows you to print to the battery-powered Sprocket Panorama anywhere, not just when connected to a Wi-Fi network. This feature is one of the main reasons we’ve chosen Sprocket Panorama as the best battery-powered portable printer. The other reason is that you can fit this printer in a small bag—or even a cargo shorts pocket.

The big tradeoff of choosing an ultra-portable printer is the size of your prints. You’ll end up with a photo that’s just two inches wide, which means you’ll see a lot less detail compared to a larger mains-powered printer. True to its name, you can print a photo that’s nine inches wide. Though our photos were small, we were pleased with how well the Sprocket Panorama’s prints looked, especially the vibrancy of the colors, and there was no denying how cool it looked for it to slowly come out of its front slot. It looked like a tongue beginning to stick out, and slicing the photo with a physical button on top of the printer was also fun. The amount of time it took to create a print depended on its size, but all of our prints took under a minute from start to finish.

If you take a lot of panoramas, this portable printer’s biggest drawback won’t matter much. One feature the Sprocket Panorama shares with the larger Studio Plus is the use of zero-ink technology, which means you can handle its prints immediately without the risk of smudging.

Epson

• Full-sized prints
• Battery is included
• Also supports an external battery for longer use

• Price

• Size: 9.1 x 12.2 x 8.5 inches
• Weight: 4.6 pounds
• Battery power: Yes (internal and optional external)
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi, USB

If you plan on using your portable printer out in the field, you’re going to need one that runs on battery power and won’t conk out halfway through the day. Epson’s Workforce WF-110 can deliver because you can run it off two batteries instead of one. The printer has a built-in battery, but you can purchase a second battery separately to further extend its runtime when you’re off the grid. Having a second battery will add to the printer’s already high price tag in this category, but you’re getting a feature the others can’t match. That said, be sure to bring either a USB-C cable or a phone that can create a wireless hotspot for your computer and printer, if you want to take advantage of their wireless printing capabilities.

The WorkForce WF-110 was designed with productivity in mind. It’s another full-sized portable printer, which means it can print on 8.5- x 11-inch sheets of paper. This is necessary if you’re meeting clients and need to work out last-minute details of a contract before printing it out for them to look over and sign. It’s a little larger than our top recommendation, but not by enough to be too noticeable. You can still take the WorkForce WF-110 in a backpack, or comfortably take it to and from a car. It supports wireless printing, and you can set it up or move through its settings by pushing buttons on the printer itself and using its 1.4-inch color screen. If you require absolute portability from your printer and don’t mind spending some extra money on spare batteries, Epson’s WorkForce WF-110 can’t be topped.

• Ultra-portable
• Battery powered
• Bluetooth connectivity

• MicroUSB charging

• Size: 3 x 5 x 1 inches
• Weight: .55 pounds
• Battery power: Yes
• Connectivity: Bluetooth

If you’d like the freedom to print your photos anywhere but don’t want to spend more than $70, Kodak’s Step is the right portable printer for you. The pocket-friendly battery-powered printer connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth using Kodak’s iOS or Android app and can spit out up to 30 2- x 3-inch prints on a single charge. The Step uses the same zero-ink technology as HP’s portable printers, which means you can touch your prints immediately without the risk of them getting ruined. Our only complaint with this portable printer is that it needs to be recharged using a MicroUSB cable rather than USB-C. This means you’ll likely need to bring an additional cord with you, which can be a little annoying if you’re taking it on vacation. That doesn’t impact the Kodak Step’s performance, so it can be easily forgiven.

There are many factors to consider when deciding which portable printer is right for you. Below are the factors we considered most important when writing this guide:

The word “portable” is ultimately subjective. Still, our largest recommendation is just over a foot long (this is necessary for making full 8.5- x 11-inch prints), under eight inches deep, and under four inches tall. This is remarkably small for a fully featured all-in-one printer, which can easily be two to three times deeper and taller. Our smaller printer is under five inches deep, three inches wide, and one inch tall, which is practically pocket-friendly.

If you’re going to be taking your portable printer out of the house, weight is a critical factor to keep in mind when choosing the best one for you. Our heaviest portable printer recommendation clocks in at six and a half pounds, while the lightest is just over half a pound.

Some of our portable printers can run off a battery, meaning they’re portable rather than just physically small. This is a neat feature, but you must remember to keep the battery charged for it to work. We’d recommend keeping a power cable around, just in case.

All of our portable printer recommendations support wireless printing over either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Many of the printers above can also be connected to a computer using a USB cable if you’d prefer.

Yes. All printers require ink to create prints.

It depends on the printer. Portable photo printers that we recommend use special paper, while the larger general-use portable printers in this guide can use standard paper.

A portable printer is worth it if you don’t have a lot of space in your home office or absolutely have to print when you’re away from your desk.

This depends on its size and feature set. Our recommendations range in price between $400 and $70.

Yes. All of the portable printers we’re recommending can print in both monochrome and color. This is most important when printing photos, but can be useful if the documents you’re working on have a lot of charts. Be mindful that pages with a lot of color will consume more ink and may take longer to print.

The answer depends on the type of portable printer you get. Some models were designed for the sole purpose of printing photos, and they’re very good at their job. The general-purpose portable printers in our guide can still be used for photography, but may not have the accurate color reproduction you’d get from using a photo printer. If you do choose to print photos from those printers, be sure to use photo paper to get the best results.

• Best overall: Canon PIXMA TR160
• Best splurge: HP OfficeJet 250
• Best for photos: HP Sprocket Studio Plus
• Best ultra-portable: HP Sprocket Panorama
• Best battery-powered: Epson WorkForce WF-110
• Best budget: KODAK Step Wireless Mobile Photo Mini Color Printer

Portable printers, especially models designed for photography, are becoming increasingly more performant with the release of new generations. They’re proof that there’s still a need to keep physical copies of photos and documents around, whether you’re looking to give someone a thoughtful gift or need to get business done. It’s most impressive that you can choose a printer like Canon’s PIXMA TR160 to get a fully featured, portable printer without having to compromise on any features. That model can even be taken with you on the road and recharged using the same cable as a MacBook Pro. A portable printer’s size alone may be enough to convince you to keep one in the house just in case. And you’ll be the hero when a legal document requires a physical signature or a less tech-savvy family member needs a picture from your wedding.

The post The best portable printers for 2025, tested and reviewed appeared first on Popular Science.