Printers

Printers
We talk about connecting printers to your wireless LAN in Chapter 11, but
what if you want to access your printer from all those portable devices that
don’t have wireless LAN connections built into them? Or, if you haven’t got
your printer connected to the wireless LAN, what do you do when you want
to quickly print a document that’s on your laptop? Well, why not use
Bluetooth?
You can get Bluetooth onto your printer in two ways:
Buy a printer with built-in Bluetooth. These are relatively rare as we
write but are becoming more widely available. An example of this comes
from HP (www.hp.com), with its DeskJet 995c printer ($399 list price). In
addition to connecting to laptops, PDAs (like the HP iPAQ) and other
mobile devices using Bluetooth, this Mac- and Windows-compatible
printer can connect to your PCs with a standard USB cable or by using
an IR connection (using a standard computer system called IrDA, which
stands for the Infrared Data Association). So you’ll be able to connect
just about any PC or portable device directly to this printer, with wires
or wirelessly.
Buy a Bluetooth adapter for your existing printer. Many printer manufacturers
haven’t got around to building printers with built-in Bluetooth
yet, but they do recognize the potential in the market. So they’ve
launched Bluetooth adapters that can plug into their existing lines of
computers. Epson (www.epson.com), for example, offers a Bluetooth
printer adapter for about $129 that plugs into the parallel port (this is
the other standard connection that you’ll find on printers — along with
USB) of most Epson Stylus printers.
What we really expect to see happen in the printer world while the prices for
the chips that allow Bluetooth and 802.11 wireless LAN technologies continue
to plummet — you read our minds! — is printers that have both 802.11 and
Bluetooth built into them.