The StarTech Airprint Network Print Server is a little box that’ll upgrade your existing wired printer into a wifi printer.
Tested on a Canon MP610 printer/scanner, this printer has been connected to a Windows 10 PC via a USB cable. Now it’s plugged into this little print server and it’s made the printer available to more than just the PC.
Setup didn’t take too long:
1) Plug the print server into your router via an Ethernet cable
2) Install the software onto your PC
3) Connect to the print server, select your wifi network and enter your wifi password
4) Unplug from your router and plug your printer in via the USB port
5) Connect to the print server on your PC using the software and you’re good to go!
The software allows your PC to automatically reconnect to the print server, which means in practice you won’t notice that it’s no longer connected via USB. It’s also great to see there was no loss of printer functionality, the PC could still use the printer as a scanner and in practice there was little difference compared to it being directly connected to the PC.
If you own an iDevice you’ll then be able to select your printer and print directly to it, for example in the video you’ll see an iPad sending a print job. This seems to take longer than from the printer, but so far it’s worked brilliantly.
Note that you can only have a single device actively connected to the print server, so if you have your PC connected you can’t print from your iDevice and will need to disconnect first.
So far there hasn’t been a way to use this with Android, but to be fair it doesn’t say it can be.
Great little box to upgrade existing equipment, just a pity it doesn’t handle multiple connections better.
Available from Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/1pA8e3s and Amazon USA: http://amzn.to/1Mt4V2v
