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How to Print From Your iPad?

How to Print From Your iPad?

After months of anticipation the new Apple iPad has finally been unleashed. There is no doubt that this new piece of kit from Apple is fantastic, however there is one major issue, which is the inability to print from it. Apple has released a statement saying the easiest way to print from their new iPad is to sync the files back to your PC or Mac and print from there! This is not the answer that many early buyers wanted to hear. According to an external source there have been some workarounds designed by third parties, but few of these actually work. What they really need to design is a third party application which allows printing to a variety of Wi-Fi printers. So far there has only been one app which has been moderately successful and that was “Air Sharing HD” which is capable of printing to Macs “on the same Wi-Fi network as your iPad”, however this app is far from perfect and has its fair share of quirks.

Currently, there are three types of apps available to enable you to print from the iPad. The first kind reported prints directly to Wi-Fi enabled printers. The second type keeps an eye out for Macs sharing printers in the same Wi-Fi network, this of course only works if you are somewhere with Macs and printers! The final type of app is the least desirable and requires a server running in the background of your PC or Mac. With the last kind it would definitely be easier to just sync your iPad.

Printing to shared printers

The previously mentioned ‘Air Share HD’, which costs approx £8 has had the most success. Unfortunately it only works by finding Macs on your Wi-Fi network, leaving PC users out in the cold. It cannot, however, access your iPad’s local files for printing. According to PC Mag “it attaches to a range of servers’ including MobileMe and email accounts, and then prints to any printer connected to a Mac on the same network. So in theory, if you email yourself a document, then you can print it, but PC Magazine only found success with their Lexmark and Epson printers. It would not work with their HP printer.

Direct Printing Apps

PC Magazine looked at three different apps for direct printing; these are Canon’s Easy Photo-Print for the iPhone, HP’s iPrint Photo and ePrint. The first application they tried was Canon’s easy photo print, this app did work, but it was far from easy as the name implies and it is only designed to print photos. You can only print screenshots saved to your gallery and nothing else. It also does not display well because it was designed to work on the phone’s much smaller screen.

HP’s iPrint Photo, which has supposedly worked on the iPhone before, would not print directly to their HP printer. It did however, find a Mac on the network and print to a shared LaserJet.

The final tried and tested app was e-Print, which costs around £2 and reportedly prints ‘contacts, photos, web pages, notes and your clipboard’ crashed whilst attempting to print to either a HP or Epson printer. It did not fare any better with a Canon printer either where it stalled out. Its only success was it managed to print to a shared Lexmark laser printer tied to a Mac on their network.

In conclusion, it is clear that in order for the iPad to find even more success and praise, a printing app that works 100% of the time is needed.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 12:04 and is filed under How to Print From Your iPad?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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