Now that I don't have access to an office printer. I needed to buy one for home to print those airplane reservations and online receipts among other things. I didn't know anything about buying a printer and found it pretty intimidating. A bit of googling and I found some good articles at about.com. I might have been influcenced by what I first saw but the Canon PIXMA IP4000 seemed like a good choice for light home printing, some photo printing and even doing 2-side printing. I found this excellent Color Inkjet Printers article that seemed to confirm my choice. I also found Steve's DigiCams had good reviews and active forums.
I wanted to keep my printer in an out of the way room, so I wanted to connect it to my wireless network. I found this is harder than I thought. Ultimately printers need to be connected to a computer (e.g., via a USB cable), if the computer is on a network it can make the printer available to other computers on the network. You can also buy a dedicated print server which is a small box with a mini-computer in it that can do what's needed (and not much else). Connect your printer to one of these and all computers on the network can use it. There are several print servers from venders such as D-Link, Linksys, and Netgear but in forums I found people had lots of problems such has using them with macs or on secured wireless networks (gotta do that). Some printers have networking built in, but they are more expensive and had similar problems, and if my home network upgrades, I don't want to have to buy a new printer too. It turns out Apple's AirPort Express can do the job...mostly. I found several complaints on forums that not everything worked right with the IP4000 and AirPort, but it appears on the unofficial AirPort Printer Compatibility List and found some people that got it working. Turns out it can do most things but for some configuration tasks you need to connect it via USB not wireless.
CompUSA had the IP4000 on sale for $30 off and Canon had a $20 rebate, so total cost was just $99! It turns out a printer cable isn't included, so I went to the Apple Store and got a USB printer cable and an AirPort Express. I got home and setup the printer (not as hard as the large setup poster made it seem) via USB cable to the PowerBook. All good, printed out Google News from Firefox in duplex mode, very nice. I checked online and found the latest drivers came on the CD, so there was no need to download any. Setting up the AirPort Express, didn't seem too hard. Since it can also send iTunes to my stereo I for now have the printer near the stereo and the AirPort Express configured for both. I connected the printer and stereo to the AirPort and plugged it in, all seemed good running through the wizard on my PowerBook, it found the AirPort and let me configure it, even using a WPA encryption password. I finished the wizard thinking things were fine but then noticed a flashing yellow light on the AirPort which means something is wrong. After a bit I realized I had MAC address filtering on my wireless network enabled so that others can't randomly connect to it, that of course would keep out the AirPort too. I turned off the filting and tried again but that didn't work. I tried to reconnect the configuration wizard to the AirPort but couldn't see the AirPort at all. I tried resetting it several times but couldn't still couldn't see it. I tried yet again and it worked! It was still configured as a client to my network (with the WPA encryption password working fine). So reset didn't seem to work, but I can print wireless from iPhoto on my PowerBook and hear iTunes on my stero while the wireless network is encrypted and filtered by MAC address. I briefly tried to configure my windows machine to print wirelessly but that wizard only saw the printer via the PowerBook and I don't think I want that. I'll play with that later.
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