Wireless printers? Why?

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

I recently was asked if a wireless printer was a good idea. I asked why they would need a wireless printer. The response was that the laptops are wireless so it would print better, right?


Dear Luser,
You still have to go to the printer to GET THE PAPER! Plug the printer in, you'll be happier with the results. I'll be happier not having to resort to the ancient practice of trepanation to clear my head of the demons you have placed there to torture my existence.



I could almost see using it in the once case where you don't want to run a cable from a switch/router to the printer but most of the time that router is in a place where a printer could reasonably be found. I suspect that a wireless printer is just a cash cow because you can stamp "WiFi" or "Wireless" or "802.11" on the box and charge more money for it. However, I can easily see dropped print jobs all over the place due to interference with the link.

What's your opinion on wireless printers? Had to deal with one yet?

Comments

[kalidor.livejournal.com]

Actually a number of times. They do have applications.

I've seen a few bluetooth printers. Worked well in a doctors office where they were using PDA's for histories and prescriptions. Also we installed a few smart whiteboards several years back that had most of the component connect via bt. One feature being an instant print-off of the whiteboard. It was a good way to give some advanced capabilities to areas where finance was a concern.

[mark13.livejournal.com]

Wow, even more useless than having a wireless mouse/keyboard as part of a static desktop setup.

"it doesn't work!"

"That's because it's eaten all the batteries again"

[asbrand.livejournal.com]

Actually, a friend of mine has one. Was very handy anytime I came over and needed to print. *shrug*

He kept it on a shelf in the room where we played D&D. *grin*

Yes...we're old school geeks...


-Az

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

Bluetooth I can see for PDAs since they don't always have drivers for everything and are very portable devices and you typically have the ability to stand at the printer (well, need to since it's Bluetooth). But I'm talking about 802.11a/b/g/n printers that aren't providing anything more than a wireless connection that a wire can already provide.

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

I never figured that out. Why a wireless keyboard and mouse when your machine is too heavy to carry around? Two thin wires don't really take up desk space.

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

But I imagine it's mainly for the convenience of not having to run the wire to that room, right? I can agree with that if the cable would be annoying to run. The majority I'm seeing have the wireless router on the desk next to the printer. We're talking five feet of cable, maybe, to connect the two.

[kalidor.livejournal.com]

Ok ... I'll give you that. although I can think of a particular loft we had to furnish that would have been nice in. Old brick which we really had trouble running wire in. We had a hell of a time making the surface mount stick, and historic site meant no screw mounting or drilling. Really small niche tho.

[thecrazyfinn.livejournal.com]

There's some good reasons (Event Photographers should love them. Much less cabling to setup/tear down at every event, and they're mostly running wifi for the camera/laptop connection already).

But the average joe? Umm, no.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

Well, we have four laptops and one desktop in the house, and the printer a multifunction up in the office loft, so rather than each of us having to run upstairs and plug in the USB cable to hit Print, I took an old decrepit Thinkpad, put a Wi-Fi PC Card in it and made it into a print server. Now we can print from anywhere any time, and it's quite nice.

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

Yeah, see, I can see precisely that when a wire is very difficult or impossible. But most people are not in that situation and, as I say elsewhere here, the majority are the printer sitting on the same desk as the wireless router or access point. How hard was it to send a wire five feet for the printer? Certainly a lot less difficult than trying to configure the wireless settings.

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

Hmm, that's a good one I didn't think of. Temporary configurations inside mobile clouds. Ok, I'll grant that one in addition to extremely difficult cable runs. The rest of the sheep, I agree with you there.

[kastinkerbell.livejournal.com]

Well, not a business application, but I would *love* one for my house. I do my homework on the couch and the printer is in another room. I don't always need the printout this very second (and, in fact, if I'm printing out a lot of things, I just want to sit here and wait until it's all done before going to the other room).

Also, not sure why the printer itself needs to be wireless, it just needs to be networked. The computers can send the requests wirelessly through the network, but the printer doesn't need to have wireless capability.

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

I'd rank that as "cable run difficult" which is acceptable. But if the printer were five feet from the router?

That reminds me, I need to keep working on my old Thinkpad. I had to shut it down and now it won't power back up.

[jjjiii]

Christ, I remember just a few years ago getting built-in 802.3 was an extra $150 or so, when a standard PCI 10/100 NIC cost all of $5. Now, they've got Ethernet, 802.11, fax line, USB, and a built in multi-card reader thing on some of these all-in-one inkjets for home use, for like $150 for the whole thing.

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

Yeah, printing across a wireless link to a networked printer is a lot different than a wireless-enabled printer and does make sense for mobile computing. But the printer really doesn't have to be wireless except in very rare, specific situations.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

Yanno, I never even checked if my router could handle print service as well. I dun' think it does though, it's a Linksys WRT54G2.

Did you already try pulling the battery off for like, half an hour?

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

I don't think the router handles print service directly but the printer has its own service on-board so it's just a network enabled printer with wireless.

Yeah, the battery is already out of it. The battery has been dead for over a year so I run without it. But it's not liking something else and I'm not sure what. The last random failure was the trackpoint mouse. It doesn't recognize the hardware anymore in the BIOS. I'm wondering if it didn't have some other odd failure.

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

I still print on a 24-pin DMP. :) Though I was given an HP OfficeJet 210 which only needs ink. I haven't hooked it up yet until I get the Linux server up and running with USB services.

[jjjiii]

I hate printers, other than as hacked musical instruments. If I want to print something, it's to PDF. If I need paper, I go to the library a block from my house and print it out on one of the public PCs, just so I never have to buy toner or clean them out or deal with @#@$#)(ing paper jams at home.

[thecrazyfinn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, difficult cable runs are another good reason for WiFi. And of course mixes of the two (IE the untethered laptop user who works at home on a non-dedicated space and wants the printer close but the desk/table is far from the router).

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

Maybe IBM's paperless office is slowly becoming a reality after all. Not fast enough but closer. :)

Of course someone will always figure out a way to need a ton of paper for something.

[snoopyh42.livejournal.com]

I love the wireless capability of my printer. It can sit on top of my fridge and I don't have to figure out how to run a cable from the "office" (also known as a breakfast nook).

My apartment network is very strange.

[graafen]

We got a wireless printer at home for a couple of reasons; mainly because we could put it anywhere in our room without having to cut new cables to where my router is, and secondly because it was actually quite cheap. IIRC there was only £5 difference between a wired printer and the wireless one we got.

[wibbble]

I know a lot of people who use wireless mice because they find the mouse wire gets in the way of their frantic mousing.

Personally, I've found that the wireless Mighty Mouse clogs up the scrollball less than the USB version, and as it's heavier it feels better to use.

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

We will never allow having those simply because people keep losing either the keyboard, the mouse, or the dongle. It's a waste of money, really.

;)

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say it's absolutely necessary, but it's one less cable to fiddle with and set up, two less ends which can get pulled loose or damage a port, the connection can't get accidentally tripped over or caught in something, it takes up no room which other items (including other cables) might find useful, it means the printer location can be moved further away from any network ports or PCs, you don't need to run out and buy a printer cable if you're setting it up for someone else, it can give printing capability to nearby portable machines (laptops, PDAs etc) without attaching and detaching cables, etc etc.

It's not so much that it has a 'killer app', it's that it has a whole lot of tiny little advantages.

Now as soon as someone figures out cheap, effective, near-zero-loss, self-configuring, one-to-many power transmission, we can get rid of 95% of both power and data cables in most user settings.

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

It's typically not a 'must have' unless you have cabling issues. But it can be a nice feature.

My cable comes into 2 rooms in my condo, the living room and the master bedroom, neither of which I want much of a network setup. The 2nd bedroom/office doesn't have a cable outlet. Rather than running wire to that room, I just have everything wireless. I don't want a printer in my living room or my bedroom, and because we have 3 machines, 2 of which are notebooks, it makes sense to have a networked printer. So I picked up a wireless printer. It was only about $20 more than a non-wireless printer of similiar quality sitting next to it. $20 for not having to buy wire, drill thru walls, crimp cable, etc seems worth it to me.

And sometimes you just don't want your printer near your router for whatever reason.

I have a HP wireless. When I was doing on-site residential I used to recommend the HP wireless printers to people who wanted them. Setup is very easy, especially if you have a XP/Vista machine as you can just pull out your trusty USB thumb drive, run the XP/Vista network setup, have it save settings to the dongle, and then insert the USB drive into the USB port on the printer, tada, all setup.

[mark13.livejournal.com]

One place I worked, it was because the boss wanted to give the impression of a clean, minimalist office - course that also involved a team of people on call to bring him new mouse batteries or find out why they stopped working periodically.

[mark13.livejournal.com]

We got through a lot of dongles at my old place, simply because they kept getting plugged into floor level front USB slots, and therefore trodden on or kicked across the room.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Personally, I prefer to go the wireless route myself for my home network. But then I have cats who like chewing cables...

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

I want a wireless printer operating on HF. So that I can print my documents from anywhere on the globe.

NICHE MARKET

[argonel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't want a wireless printer until I don't need to plug it into the wall or watch it eat batteries.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Eh... my desk surface is large, and the flatscreen monitor is set fairly far back, so there's a lot of desk space between me and it. The tower is under the desk. With a wireless mouse I can connect the base unit to the tower and have it sit in an inconspicuous place, and have the mouse itself closer to my edge with a clear line of sight to the base. This frees up all that expanse of desk for things like notes or lunch that I wouldn't want to drag a mouse cord through.

The biggest thing to get used to was the battery life. I always forgot to hang up the mouse when I was not sitting at the computer, so it would run out of juice and usually die out in the middle of a game. Mouse death is far more embarrassing than lag death.

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

Actually, a friend of mine has one. Was very handy anytime I came over and needed to print. *shrug*

That's why the wired printer is hooked to his server (be it over the network for nice relocation, or local because the printer doesn't talk ethernet) and then it shows up on your box because it's a normal CUPS printer, and you just print to it.

Or, you use Windows, which means there are drivers to install and it all becomes a pain.

[ptstech.livejournal.com]

Complete and utter waste. Our sales reps, both here and at my last place, had some serious wood for those damned things.

To date none of them (read NOT A SINGLE DAMNED ONE OF THEM) had a need to, or interest in, printing from any room other than the one the printer was in.

[mariasama16.livejournal.com]

We have a wireless printer in the house and it was handy while we were in the process of using up the ink on our previous printer. We replaced the previous printer because it couldn't handle colors properly and everything was coming out pink tinged. After we got the new printer, the old one was used for throwaway printing applications (such as recipes we were going to cook, etc). Since both were multi-function and there's only so much space on the desktop (especially with 2 desktops connected via KVM, and router/modem/etc), the wireless printer was put on top of a filing cabinet. It was accessible for getting paper in and out of it, but no need to worry about cables, other than power.

[curiousbiped.livejournal.com]

You're confused. The trepanation isn't for you, it's something you do to _them_ to get the demons out of their head. They need it way more than you do, and it's a lot more fun.

Just make sure to have a lot of paper towels handy.

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

This is the exact config I have at my place. The network printer plugs right into my switch and the router merrily shuffles data for it from the wireless subnet to the wired subnet.

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

I have a burning hatred for wireless printers, but I have to admit it might just be a bleed-over from the ONE absolutely positively self-important whining fucking useless piece of pathetic filth at work.... who just HAD to have one at home, just HAD to make it work with his work laptop, refused to bring it in for me to look at despite me not being allowed to work on non-company things, yet HAD to have it work wirelessly instead of connecting the damn cable that he had right there, and whined at me saying he paid A LOT and I HAD to make it work because if was For Business... no, sorry I can't come out to your place to work on it.. .

Grrr.....

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I do have to wonder about the security implication of wireless, though. You're either sending the data through the air or (using psuedo-wireless) through the power lines of the house, which aren't generally built for data security.