and because i’m a lazy ass i didn’t read the specs but just read the search engine result.
I also assumed that because 6 years ago i bought a $50 hp envy and it had wifi, this much expensive one is also going to have it
Result: that $250 printer doesn’t actually have wifi
There’s also much less chance that you can print easily from your pc
I dunno, I’ve been.printing through a print server for decades. I find it far less problematic than wifi-connected printers (especially consumer ones).
Consumer wifi printers are a kludgey mess.
Server or not, it needs to connect to the network
And a raspberry pi will do a hell of a lot better job at doing that than the printer.
Our brother printer at work is otherwise a fairly great printer. But dear god does it have the WORLDS WORST wifi connectivity. I had to put it directly under an AP at work so it wouldn’t try to connect to one on the other side of the office at 0.1Mbps and constantly dropping packets.
I set up a RPI 2 at my parent’s house connected to a 15 year old printer and it works like magic. Basically any device can detect and use the printer using Samba as long as it’s on the network. No drivers or anything.
It should work a lot better
I have to disagree. I support a Multi-Site org where all windows printing goes through cups servers first, we’ve never had a problem connecting any printer. If anything, it makes it easier for us to replace printers as we can keep the same print queue and send it to the physical replacement printer without the windows devices needing to do anything.