Printing via Airprint and Airport Express

It is extremely lame that apple would highlight this feature and only have 5 or 6 printers that you can print with.

Albeit I have a windows 7 system, I do have an airport network with one of my printers hooked up to the airport for wireless printing.

Absolutely no forethought from Mr Jobs on how we'd think about this.

His one sentence email answers would like state: "just by an HP printer"

The HP iPrint app works well with a "non-supported" HP Photosmart C5280 connected to an Airport Express. Why the heck can't Apple integrate this same functionality into its OS?

The difference is that HP iPrint Photo contains the drivers for the HP Printers that it supports. For Apple to include them, and every other vendors printer driver that exists on the Mac, it would take several gigabytes of space. AirPrint is one driver provided by Apple, that supports any AirPrint compatible printer. Sometimes moving forward takes growing pains.

Just trying to help.

Andrew

Try printopia, linked in Julian's post. In any case according to apple, airprint only lets you print from mail, safari, and photos, so it's pretty lame even if it supported all printers.

See: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4356

Actually, Pages and Numbers can do AirPrint after being upgraded, so it is not lame at all. I work complex pages in Pages and spreadsheets in Number and welcome the printing feature! It works really well with Printopia -- just amazing!! Used to use PogoPlug, but will still use it for cloud printing.

Message was edited by: Coolmax

I think that any iOS devices are limited in terms of storage space anyhow, so there is a finite point where you want to lay your support on wireless printing. So Apple chose a set driver and that all printers will need to work with this setup. In the meantime, most of us run a Mac server anyhow for the iPad (Air Video, Eye TV, etc..), so paying $10 for Printopia is a no brainer..

Yes, I went back and corrected that, but sorry, Coolmax, Airprint is pretty lame right now.

Understood. But couldn't one conceivably download only the drivers needed, say, from the App Store? Isn't that essentially how most computer operating systems work? (yes, I realize those drivers don't exist yet for the iPad OS...I'm just sayin'...)

I hope Printopia sends Apple a great Christmas card for all the sales they are getting thanks to Apple's arrogance. (It does work great BTW - was it THAT hard for Apple to do this?) Just as the iPhone is getting kicked by Android thanks partly to Apple's insistance on sticking only with AT&T and it's horrible coverage and service, the iPad won't be the only game in town for long either and you can bet it's competitors will print to more than 6 printers out of all the ones in the entire world without the classic Apple line, "If you want to work with us you have to do it by out rules".

Barbara and the rest,

I don't really think you guys really understand the mechanics of AirPrint. The true mechanics of AirPrint is that it centered around the concept of Cloud Printing. Unless you appreciate or even use it, you will never understand where Apple is going. Apple is going the right direction like they did with the omission of the 3.5" floppy drive. Remember then that so many experts told Apple that they were so wrong in eliminating it? Today, who cares about floppies.

The concept of cloud printing is based upon the printer being a printing station and that it takes care of requests coming from other internet devices, being phones, tablets, netbooks etc either from a local LAN or from WLAN.. Currently, I have a Pogo Plug and a Mac server set up this way. Pogoplug takes care of email requests, where as the Mac runs Printopia. Guess what when I took this setup to a trade show with our large format printer?!? Everyone can print their work off our printer because as long as they can print to PDF and email the document(s) off to the PogoPlug. It works!! In the past, we were spending so much wasted time trying to find printer drivers for our clients' computers. AND, most corporate computers are locked out from installing any new printer drivers because only their IT people have admin rights! With Air Print, there is no need to install drivers of any kind and with printers which can take requests from email, all the better.

New Air Print capable printers are also capable of accepting cloud requests as well! Dah, that isn't hard to figure out. The future is cloud storage and cloud printing. Those who think Apple should do direct printing are going to be ending up with the same mindset as those who said Apple made a big mistake removing the 3.5" floppy drive on the then new Apple G3 blue tower!

Message was edited by: Coolmax

I think it is fair to say that most people care a great deal more about being able to do what they need to do than about concepts and philosophies. The simple fact is that at this moment Airprint is useless to most people (and many people are not that sold on cloud computing, you know, although I fail to see what that has to do with the immediate situation).

I don't see how being unhappy about being unable to print is any way equivalent to complaining about the removal of floppies, sorry. If you need to print you need to print. As a mac user, I can use printopia and that's fine. But I'm durned if I know what to recommend to windows ipad owners I know. Do you have a suggestion?

Yes, and it is called the Pogoplug.

It provides cloud storage through PogoPlug HD, WIFI H.264 streaming of movies for iPad with VGA cable to your HDTV provided movies are converted from AVI, WMV, DIVX to H.264 using Handbrake (Quad Core recommended) or Badaboom (Nvidia CUDA)and wireless printing to most HP and Epson printers. It too has limitations in terms of print support. Also, you also forget that printers these days are disposable items! I mean, how expensive is it to buy a new printer to support Pogoplug or Air Print?

These days, most people don't print anyhow unless it's necessary. I only print a few pages for promotional purposes. Everything else is on PDF files stored on our WebDAV or Pogoplug server. People prefer that.

Message was edited by: Coolmax

No, sorry, that's not what I'm asking. I know a great many people who just want to send a file from their ipad to their printer on the local network, the way you can with printopia. No cloud. Sorry I wasn't clear.

Hi,
Haven't tried this...but I own an iMac, so for windows users this YouTube video may help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GlHQHB-74U

Good luck.

Yes it works on my PC as well. This should answer Barbara's query for PC only users.

Thanks. Yes, that might work, but I'm thinking of the kind of windows users who can barely install regular software--they'd have a stroke at the thought of hacking anything. 🙂

After all, there are a lot people to whom the iPad appeals precisely because it's not technically challenging. I just wish I had a simple solution for them.