AirPrint Compatible Laser Printer

jurgenp said:

Hi,

I'm looking to buy a new wireless duplex laser printer (like the Brother HL-2270DW) but I'm a little confused about airPrint support for my iPad/iPhone. Is airPrint something that the printer has to support or does it work with any wireless printer? I already found out that there is software to make a local USB printer support airPrint but since I prefer to have a wireless one I'm unsure what to look for.

Can anybody shed some light for me on this?

Thanks,

Jurgen

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Hi Jurgen, Didn't have any luck with Airprint, it is printer supported. I installed Printopia from the app store. As long as the computer is up and running, any printer associated with it is useable

jurgenp said:

Hi,

I'm looking to buy a new wireless duplex laser printer (like the Brother HL-2270DW) but I'm a little confused about airPrint support for my iPad/iPhone. Is airPrint something that the printer has to support or does it work with any wireless printer? I already found out that there is software to make a local USB printer support airPrint but since I prefer to have a wireless one I'm unsure what to look for.

Can anybody shed some light for me on this?

Thanks,

Jurgen

Click to expand...

I read somewhere that some new HP Laser Printers, including Color Lasers are AirPrint compatible.
I'll do recommend that you stay away from any non-HP printers, unless it has very good reviews and good history of maintaining part supplies.

I actually applied a hack to my MAC to be able to print using AirPrint from my iPad, but I need a way to print to any printer (or at least most printers) at any location I visit. There are several options, but read that only print what's shown on the screen and at screen resolution, so the quality is terrible.

Mac Hack

Iceman

Could you describe the MAC Hack you applied to be able to print from your ipad? I've got an iPad and HP Laserjet 1315 cMFP hooked up via Ethernet to my Airport Station. I'd love to be able to print to it from my iPad, I can print to it from every other computer.

Also, I have a Mac Pro and Macbook Pro, iPad, and two iPhone 4's that I would like to learn more about networking. I just installed OSX Server on the Mac Pro but I am a novice as far as Mac Network Administration goes. I'd love if someone could recommend a book or some How-To resources.

Thanks!
Tim

You can get the lastest update to Airprinter Activator Here

Pomeroy said:

You can get the lastest update to Airprinter Activator Here

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thanks for this, have the brother 2270dw, googled and got to this thread. They have a Lion ready one which works perfect. Thanks!!

Like many Apple "proprietary" standards, AirPrint is really a tweak on top of an open standard. In this case, IPP, or Internet Printing Protocol.

The "tweak", in this case, is that standard Zeroconf (a.k.a. Boujour, another "proprietary" Apple protocol that isn't) service announcements won't work. The service announcement needs some tweaks.

So, if the printer doesn't make the proper announcement, it won't be seen by your iOS devices.

In theory, any printer that supports IPP can work, with the proper service announcements.

Fortunately, it's possible to have a Zeroconf server make announcements on behalf of another device. So, any always-on computer could make the announcements for the printer. Just use a different name for the "proxied" announcements. e.g. "airprint-brother".

Of course, if you have an always-on computer, you might as well just connect your printer to it.

That's the setup I have. I have a really old Samsung color laser that has no network connection, hooked-up via USB to my Linux server. I added an airprint-compatible service announcement for the print queue on the Linux box, and now all my iOS devices can Airprint to the Samsung through the Linux server.

There are various commercial software products for Windows or OSX that will do the same thing. For me, it was just making a modified copy of a little configuration file.

aznguyen316 said:

thanks for this, have the brother 2270dw, googled and got to this thread. They have a Lion ready one which works perfect. Thanks!!

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Yep, I can confirm this app works great. Just did my first ever direct print from my iPhone. Awesome! I have a brother HL-2270dw as well. The entire setup was under a minute.

Brother also has their own free app in the app store and then you don't need airprint activator if you don't want to use it (I use both FYI)...

J&JPolangin said:

Brother also has their own free app in the app store and then you don't need airprint activator if you don't want to use it (I use both FYI)...

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What is it called? All I see is Brother iPrint&Label, which prints to label printers.

Print&scan

wgnoyes said:

What is it called? All I see is Brother iPrint&Label, which prints to label printers.

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There's another one called Brother iPrint&scan. Works on my IPad, I haven't tried it on my phone yet.

RUGERMAN said:

There's another one called Brother iPrint&scan. Works on my IPad, I haven't tried it on my phone yet.

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Thanks!