Wireless Printing


Printer Services Newsletter 4.0

Welcome to the latest in our series of newsletters designed to help you understand your printer better.  This time around we are bringing you an overview of the wireless laser printer options and our experiences with this setup. 

Wireless Printing

As the speeds increase due to the improved wireless networking protocols people are turning to wireless for their home office / small office as you save on the costs in wiring up the office or home.  The question we are asked a lot is; Do you go for a wireless printer or not?

It has been our experience to avoid printers with built in wireless networking. This is due to the fact that connection reliability is nowhere as good as a hard wired connection.  It is not uncommon for a wireless networked printer to drop off the network and becomes very difficult to get it back online without having a high degree of technical understanding.  Print speed also becomes an issue when the connection that links the wireless devices together suffers congestion due to wireless bandwidth being used by multiple devices.

The best way we have found to set up a printer for wireless printing is to have it connected directly to a wireless router via its Ethernet Port.  This way you will not have the problem of the machine dropping off the network as it is hard wired.  This may not always be  possible if you have your printer in a room away from your wireless router.
  With the newer ranges of wireless printers and routers you will have access to one button connects for wireless printing with the WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) system.  The WPS system is a simple setup and is very much like pairing Bluetooth devices as both machines have to be on and broadcasting to setup the connection.

The down side to this is that it is a new standard in wireless connecting which is not always compatible with older wireless devices and simply will not connect to some routers and computers.
 
As technology changes wireless features will get more reliable and faster.  As long as we have multiple devices like phones and microwave transmitting on similar frequencies wireless will have their limitations.


The Green Corner

Solid Ink

In today’s business world the need to be green and plan for the future is becoming a bigger and bigger issue.  As it stands laser printers are becoming cheaper and cheaper to buy as the costs of mass producing them are reduced. This is leading down the path that the Ink/Bubble jet printers have sadly gone down in that it costs more for the replacement toners/inks than the machine.
At this time one of the better environmental options is to look at the solid ink range of machines.  Because the main consumable is a block of ink that is melted into the print head there is up to 90% less waste than your normal laser printer which still has a plastic container to be disposed of once the toner is finished. The downsides to these machines at this point is that they need to be printing a good amount so that the ink doesn’t dry up blocking the head and that they are large machines that are very noisy compared to a laser.

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