First, a little background about my situation. I'm in a pretty transitional period in my life because I'm working low-paying seasonal field jobs while looking for a career position. I've moved cross-country a few times and probably will again, with only what I can cram into my vehicle. I split my time between a dorm room provided by my employer during the week, and my sister's spare bedroom on the weekends. I've missed very few of the things I stored at my parents' house on the other side of the country (other than my many books).
A few months later, I'm really missing having access to a printer. I'm living in a major metropolitan area with poor signage and heavy traffic, so I need to look up driving directions to get just about anywhere, and it's frustrating to not be able to print a quick map. I'm also learning a musical instrument, and I really need to be able to print the songs I'm trying to learn; it's just not practical to carry the laptop everywhere or write everything out by hand. I'm also starting to miss the scanner functionality for several reasons (fighting paperwork buildup over the last few months, depositing checks to my bank in another state), but I don't know if I can find one device that does both well.
Obviously, I don't have much working space for a large, clunky printer, nor do I have much space in my vehicle for the next time I move. I'm also on a tight budget. I used to have a printer/scanner/fax that wasn't too expensive, but it was BIG. It had lots of trays and page feeders and doohickeys that stuck out awkwardly, and every time I moved, I had to haul out the ginormous box it came in, with the styrofoam inserts that were required to keep parts from breaking off. This box was quite a bit bigger than the banker boxes I packed everything else in.
Can anybody recommend a good printer that is either designed to be mobile, or at least packs down easily into a small package for the next move? It seems like the mobile printers and scanners on the market are $200-$300 and up, while I could just buy a cheapo 3-in-1 for $100. As for scanners, I supposed the ScanSnap is probably the best out there, but I'm not keen on buying a device that can work only on my Macbook or Windows laptop but not both, or proprietary software that will store my data in some weird format that I can't access easily in the future.
