Wifi Printing Brings A Bit Of Sanity

For several years I had a HP laserjet printer. It was functional. It printed stuff when I needed it, but, unfortunately, whatever drivers it needed did not “play nice” with my Mac and eventually I had to retire it. I mentioned my printer dilemma to a friend a couple of months ago and he suggested a couple of models of wifi enabled printers. I like wifi and bluetooth devices, since I hate having lots of cables, plus with wifi it means that you aren’t restricted to a single machine. It’s 2014 so the number of networked devices I have is constantly growing. Being tied to a single device with a cable isn’t my idea of “fun”!

Technology has moved on, as have prices. Networked printers used to be expensive and not affordable for home / home office use. However nowadays you can get a wifi enabled printer for around €100.

In the end I settled on the Samsung M2070W.

It’s a “multi-function” printer, so it can do more than just print as it also has scanner and copier function. I didn’t want or need a colour printer, which is why I chose a mono model. Colour printers are usually more expensive to run, as the ink cartridges are quite expensive. I don’t need to print in colour, so I couldn’t see any point in getting anything other than a mono printer.

Setting it up was easy. Once you’ve removed the packaging and fitted the printer cartridge you simply plug it in and then run the setup software to get it connected to your wifi network. Once it’s on the network you can then easily access it from any Mac (or PC).

But what really interested me was the functionality for mobile. Being able to send documents to print from either my iPhone or iPad was something I’d never been able to do previously. Samsung provide a special app for iPhone (and iPad) which not only lets you send documents to print, but also gives you a good bit of control over them.

I’ll never need to print large volumes of pages at home, but being able to print off contracts, NDAs, boarding passes and a variety of other paperwork makes a lot of things significantly easier.