What if you could go to the park, take out your laptop, and start printing your documents? What if you could do this without lugging around a portable printer? What if your LAPTOP contained a built-in PRINTER? These questions were not very commonly asked in 1993, but nonetheless, Canon came up with a solution: The NoteJet.

The NoteJet was a line of laptop/printer hybrids that Canon produced from roughly 1993 to 1995. They came in various versions – all the way up to the color 486 model – but all of them had one thing in common: a built-in bubblejet printer. With this, the user could feed paper in to the front of the laptop/printer, and it would come out the back. For thicker pages, the user could lift the keyboard to get better access to the input mechanism.

This concept actually made more sense than people give it credit for. At the time, if you were a traveling businessman at a hotel, and you needed a printout of a file, you would typically fax it to the hotel lobby. With the NoteJet, you could do all of this from your hotel room – even on battery power.

Other companies copied the NoteJet, such as IBM (which released a very similar model, the ThinkPad 555BJ – short for 555 BubbleJet).

I’ve had a few of these over the years. The keyboards, generally speaking, were of very good design. The hinges, on the other hand, were not. The laptop weighed roughly 11 pounds, which is roughly equivalent to the weight of the IBM PS/2 CL57SX that came out a year earlier.

PC Magazine wrote a review of the IIIcx, one of the NoteJet models.

Oddly enough, in 2018, you can still easily get ink cartridges for the NoteJet.