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Anyone using AirPrint from Apple products?

CES020

New Member
Is anyone using AirPrint from their iPhones/iPads? I have a family member that has an iPad and I planned on getting them a printer for Christmas. However, I couldn't get a straight answer from anyone, nor could I find the information online about the set up.

My question, hopefully to someone using it, would be, does it print directly to the printer using AirPrint or does it go to the internet and back to the printer?

In all my discussions with sales people at office supply places, electronics places, and even the apple store, I couldn't get a single person to explain how it works and they seemed bothered I was even asking them so many questions about it.

The issue is that the family member lives in a rural environment. They have Satellite for internet and there are some serious restrictions on it. There is a daily allowance of about 250MB per day. Once you hit that, it throttles back your speed radically. The upload speed is very slow, the download is fair.

Most sales people used the sales pitch "if you can email it, you can print it". I kept trying to get around to my point, which is, if they are sitting there with an iPad, and they want to print photos, they could print 10 photos, it would have to upload them at a snails pace, then download the very same files to the printer, which could easily max out their daily limit by just printing some photos.

I explained that it didn't make sense to burn bandwidth to print something for this application.

They all seemed equally puzzled and not one of them could tell me how AirPrint works, if it did use the internet, or if it was something that worked through bluetooth or wifi on their existing network.

So, anyone using it? If so, can you confirm whether or not you have to have an internet connection to use the printer in that mode?

Christmas is over and I got them something else, but now I'd like to know for my own curiosity.
 

John L

New Member
As far as I know... You wont use bandwidth for local printing. The printer is connected to wifi. The iPad/phone is connected to wifi. When you print it transmits through the wifi to the printer.

Another benefit is that you can email things to most of these same printers to print out. But that would use bandwidth.
 

CES020

New Member
That's how I thought it worked, but not a single person selling them, apple employees or other could verify it, and when you look at the HP website, it doesn't say "AirPrint" so much, it says "ePrint", which is their service (I could have that messed up, e-print might be the Epson version of it), but no one can tell me "yes" or "no", they all say "I don't know".
 

2NinerNiner2

New Member
Works like a charm on my iPad 2, iPhone 4 and iPod-touch :)

I have an HP P1102w b&w laser and a D110b ink jet and all three devices print just fine via WiFi. You set them up to connect to your local WiFi as you would any other WiFi device. Once connected, any app that supports AirPrint will see the connected printer and away you go :)
 
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