How printing on wireless networks works.
Printing on wireless networks happens just like it does on “normal” (wired) networks. You still have a software application printing to a network printer. There are several options for configuration. The simplest is simply to plug the printer’s USB cable into the mobile computer whenever you want a hardcopy. Of course this defeats the whole point of being wireless and is no fun whatsoever. Some are designed to be connected directly to networks and be shared by many workstations. These can easily be identified by the presence of an ethernet port on the device. The ethernet port looks like a phone jack but is about twice as wide. People that use a lot of paper sometimes buy older laser jets on e-bay because toners are much cheaper than the tiny inkjet cartridges used in most inkjet models. If you go this route, many will have the jack; you can make sure it is present before you buy it if your willing to configure it. Normally these are only available in expensive models intended for a business, thus the e-bay purchases of used printing equipment. If you have a desktop you can configure it to act as a print server. It must be on when you click ok, but you can get a hardcopy from the mobile computer whenever you want without touching the desktop. There can also be as many workstations as you want set up this way. Alternatively you can buy one, which comes as a small electronic device that sits out of sight near the other equipment. These devices are not expensive, simplify printing, and are frequently used by IT professionals to connect cheap printers where they would otherwise be using higher end technologies costing several hundred dollars.
No matter how you have your network setup; using it on a wireless network happens basically the same regardless of which of the many types of networks you have. Your software application asks you to select the destination of the printed paper. Once you click ok, whatever program your working from, uses your operating system’s drivers to format what it is about to convert to ink. It is formatted into a special encoding so that the hardware knows how to write it correctly. When you selected the destination you also told the computer where on your wireless network, or on your USB connection, the hardware is at. Your laptop then makes a network connection to the printer so it can talk to it. It doesn’t really care if it using a wireless network just that it can talk to it, or to the printing appliance if there is one. Your computer then sends the digital pages to the printer. However if there is a print server on the network, the information doesn’t actually go to the printer yet. The entire document, now encoded as a a print job, goes to the appliance. The entire thing is transferred into what’s called a print queue and the laptop forgets all about it.
The job of print servers are to accept print jobs from wireless networks the users are on, make the connection to the printers, and handle everything from there. Once the appliance has the entire job it goes into the print queue. Then it connects to the hardware to let it know it will be making a printed page. It probably connects through a USB cable, but doesn’t have to. No matter how it is connected, it initializes the hardware. The machine does not actually start working on your page yet. Most consumer grade (dot matrix or inkjet) devices first do some checks, as they do when they first turn on. If it’s an inkjet (the vast majority not at a business) you’ll see it move the head back and forth as it diligently makes sure it is capable of creating the requested hardcopy. It also checks if there is enough ink, if black ink runs out it politely prints with the much more expensive color ink. It knows to combine 3 colors to make black even though it is also using three times the ink. This is done to make the printed result look just as good as if it actually had the black ink it would otherwise use but can’t. If it is a laser jet, for example at a business, it warms up the drums which are designed to operate at quite hot temperatures. Once it is ready, it then retrieves a piece of paper. The machine positions the paper where it wants it to be when it to starts placing ink on the page. Small parts of the page are sent to the printer at once. The equipment doesn’t actually get the entire document from the laptop or server at once because it only is capable of storing a portion of a page. Depending on the model and drivers in use, it gets larger or smaller parts at a time. However it does store part of a page at once, if you disconnect your workstation from the network while printing, it will continue but not for long if there is nothing to buffer the document.
Regardless of if your printing from wired networks or wireless networks the printing works the same; you just are getting connectivity a little differently. If you are using an inexpensive appliance, a desktop to share the printer, or are connecting a USB cable to a laptop every time the printer acts the same. Actually the printer can’t tell the difference. How you connect the printer to your workstation, or the printer to your network does however affect how much you have to do to print.
This Network Print server from Macmall is suitable for most of us regardless of if you have a Mac or not.
Shoppers Choice.com has some print servers as well.