Wireless Printer suggestions?

[kingston73]

Hello, not sure what section to post this in: I bought my wife a macbook pro which she loves but it refuses to connect to our current printer. We have an old Canon (non-wireless) that is connect via USB to our wireless router. My win10 laptop connects without issue to it but her macbook just refuses to connect no matter what I've tried.

My question is this, is it my fault or the printers fault? Is it possible for a printer to just not be compatible with the mac?

2nd question: any suggestions on decent, working wifi printers that are compatible? We don't need anything fancy, my main concern is something economical to use.

Mods, please feel free to move this to whatever section you feel is most appropriate, thank you.

 

[JohnDS]

Hard to answer your question without the model of the Canon and the model of the router.

I have always had good luck with Brother printers and they have good Mac support. If you don't need colour, a cheap Brother laser will be very economical to run.

 

[chscag]

How are you connecting the Canon to the MacBook Pro? From your description above it appears you're connecting the Canon to your wireless router? What model is the Canon? If the Canon site does not have drivers for El Capitan (assuming that's the version of OS X the MacBook Pro is running), you may be able to find a third party driver that works such as "Gutenprint" for OS X.

As for your second question: Any good quality printer that is OS X compatible with available drivers should work. Brother, Epson, HP, and Canon all have Mac compatible printers that are wireless.

 

[kingston73]

THe printer is an mp330, I think it is about 7 years old, maybe a little older than that. The router is a Tmobile Cellspot, basically an asus 1900. The printer isn't designed to be a network printer, I connected it to the router via usb. I tried installing drivers on the mac from canon's site but that doesn't seem to help. I'll try the Gutenprint driver you mentioned.

As for the printer suggestion, I've read good things about Brother so I may focus on looking for one of those.

 

[Peter Franks]

My 2 pennies worth, I'd never buy another Epson. I used to print out docs very rarely, and pay £40 odd for the replacement cartridges. I would sometimes print 2 or 3 pages, and then not have need to use for a further 4 weeks. When I came to use it, it would come up that printer was out of ink. There was no way for that to be possible, or for it to be too old and dry up. Their cartridges were obviously on some sort of timer, and this is what prevented me from getting more than a few pages out of each replacement. This happened about 4 or 5 times till I gave up with it. I've since seen stories of people with cases against them for exactly this behaviour. So, just saying.... I'd never by one again. I'd quite like a laser printer, but only if they do really small ones, no more than A4 size. I don't think you can get away with that behaviour with toner, because you can feel and see how much is left in them?

 

[chscag]

My experience with Epson is just the opposite from yours. I have an Epson that came free (after rebate) from Apple when I purchased an iMac. It's been a work horse since and I have never had a problem with cartridges drying up. I even use refillable cartridges that I purchase from the net at a discount price. Like anything else personal experiences differ but I do agree about using a laser printer. If all you need is B&W printing, a laser printer is probably the most economical. Nowadays, even color lasers can be purchased for much less than their cost several years ago.