What Printers Work with the iPad?

Wireless printing is now possible with the Apple iPad with the help of Apple’s AirPrint. If you are wondering about a printer’s compatibility with the iPad, then this article will provide you with the answers that you are looking for.

The iPad is a marvelous tablet that has clearly changed the dynamics of the computer industry. The iPad may look like a giant iPhone, but make no mistake about it, it is slowly eating into the market share of notebooks and netbooks at a consistent pace. It is also leading to a surge of rival offerings in the tablet market segment, so the future of laptops seems a little bleak at the moment.

There are very few advantages that laptops have over tablets today (admittedly most of them are insurmountable advantages), but one of these benefits has now been struck down by the iPad. The ability to connect a printer to a laptop or even sync it with a laptop wirelessly is something that worked in the favor of notebooks, but now the iPad can do this as well. This is a huge improvement for to the iPad, because now it can print documents without the need of transferring it to another device.

The lack of many connector ports on the iPad mean that it will never be possible to connect it to a printer physically, but doing so wirelessly is now possible, thanks to Apple’s AirPrint feature. This feature was a major part of the update to iOS 4.2, and it allows the iPhone, iPad, and the iPod Touch to print files wirelessly. The only downside that we can see is that you can’t change any options while printing, except the quantity or number of copies to be printed. This could be a drawback for some users, though it should not be a very big one. Another potential drawback could be the slightly higher price of these printers, but with the technology becoming mainstream, this will cease to be a problem soon.

Currently there are more than 1,000 printers from all major manufacturers that are compatible with AirPrint. In the following sections, we provide you with a list of these printers.

If you have a printer that is not present in the list, then you can install third-party apps that let you print documents wirelessly from your iPad. However, most third-party apps also require that your desktop or laptop be on, and be connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the printer and the iPad. Others that let you print directly from the iPad are expensive, at almost USD 20. This is, however, still much cheaper than buying a new printer compatible with Apple’s AirPrint technology. These apps promise to turn almost any printer in to an AirPrint compatible one.

• Brother
• Canon
• Dell
• Epson
• Fuji
• Gestetner
• Hewlett-Packard
• Infotec
• Kyocera
• Lanier
• Lenovo
• Lexmark
• NRG
• NTT
• Oki Data
• Olivetti
• Ricoh
• Samsung
• Savin
• Sharp
• TA Triumph-Adler/UTAX
• Toshiba
• Xerox
• Zink

The best part of AirPrint is that other Apple products, like the iPhone and the iPod Touch, can also use this provision, and this is in addition to computer operating systems like Windows OS and Mac OS. Wireless printing via the iPad makes it an even better proposition, and this has given the tablet the edge over rival products that have to settle for unreliable third-party apps to provide this feature.