Is wireless printing worth it?

BRAINS!

I'm considering buying a wireless-capable printer.

Does anybody currently use this or recommend it? The reason I ask is I use my laptop more than my desktop for things I would print (i.e. pay bills and print receipts and such) and it is annoying to transfer these kind of things to my thumb drive to print later from the desktop.

I don't know that much about them, but from what I understand there is either bluetooth (my laptop has) or wifi?

Is the extra price worth it or should I just go upstairs and pay my bills on my desktop and quit whining?

Wezoin

I use a Lexmark X4580 (I think thats the number, I never pay much attention to it since I dont have to look at it) anyway, its got the wifi capabilities. It's really great being anywhere in the house and just printing right away instead of having to mess with cables and crap.

I'd recommend getting one.

japan

You could share the printer over the network to your laptop (I'm assuming you already have some kind of wireless router). It does mean that your desktop would have to be on to print anything.

Or, you could get one of those dinky little print servers that plug into the printer via parallel/usb and set up both computers to print over the network. Might be cheaper, depending on what kind of printer you have, or are considering purchasing. This is the kind of thing I'm thinking of, but there are loads of them in both wired and wireless versions. Wired tends to be a little cheaper if you don't mind putting your printer next to your router.

AngelHedgie

japan wrote: »

You could share the printer over the network to your laptop (I'm assuming you already have some kind of wireless router). It does mean that your desktop would have to be on to print anything.

Or, you could get one of those dinky little print servers that plug into the printer via parallel/usb and set up both computers to print over the network. Might be cheaper, depending on what kind of printer you have, or are considering purchasing. This is the kind of thing I'm thinking of, but there are loads of them in both wired and wireless versions. Wired tends to be a little cheaper if you don't mind putting your printer next to your router.

One that I really like that's made by Netgear is a combo print server (with support for two printers) / wireless bridge / 4 port switch. This is great because it basically allows you to set up a small network section as long as you can get a wireless signal to it.

Glorfindel

Apple's Airport Extreme also allows you to share a printer and/or hard drives wirelessly by installing Bonjour and plugging them into the base station.

DrFrylock

Extenral print servers (either wired or wireless) are good and bad. They're much, much better with laser printers than inkjet printers, and sometimes advanced two-way features (such as the ability to determine how much ink is left in the cartridge) won't work over an external print server. There are also some minor annoyances such as not being able to autodetect the printer type and having to select and configure drivers manually. The reason laser printers are generally better than inkjets in this regard is that there's less fancy stuff going on in the driver software. Because inkjets are so cheap, the "drivers" for these printers are generally monster packages of crapware, adware, and trialware. I installed an HP Inkjet for a family member a year ago and the "drivers" were 500MB and took an hour and twenty minutes to install.

Probably the best thing to do is to get a printer that has wired Ethernet connectivity built in (which means it has a print server built in and drivers that can handle it) and then plug it into your wireless router. That way, you can print to it from anywhere on your network and you know that all the two-way features work. If you configure things right, of course, you can print to it from anywhere in the world.