hap's blog: How To Enable AirPrint for iOS Printing From Any Mac or Windows PC

How To Enable AirPrint for iOS Printing From Any Mac or Windows PC:

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You have an iOS device like an iPhone or iPad, you have a printer, and you want to print things—the only problem is your printer isn’t AirPrint compatible. No problem, read on as we show you how to print to older printers.

In the fall of 2010 Apple released the iOS 4.2 update that included a host of updated features including support for a new mobile/wireless printing protocol AirPrint. At the time there were barely a dozen HP printers that supported the service and even though the number has grown and includes a handful of offerings from the major printing companies there are still thousands upon thousands of printers—old and new—that do not support AirPrint. There’s absolutely no reason to go out and buy a new printer when you can easily tweak your existing printer to support printing from your iOS device.

There are actually two ways to go about achieving iOS-to-printer communication if you don’t have an AirPrint compatible printer. If you’re lucky the manufacturer of your printer has released an iOS helper app that allows iOS to communicate with your printer even if you don’t have a printer with native AirPrint support.

It’s important to note that this solution is only effective for people who have a Wi-Fi enabled printer that isn’t supported by AirPlay but is supported via the third-party iOS helper app released by the manufacturer of their printer. We’re not going to focus on using the company-dependent apps in this tutorial but the apps are all free-as-in-beer and they might be just the solution you need. Be forewarned that many of the apps are limited (Canon’s app, for example, only prints photos). Here is a list of available applications by company.

If you luck out and the manufacturer-supplied helper app works awesome for your needs, that’s awesome. We tested several of the apps on various printers around the office and found them lacking in a variety of ways—the most obvious of which was the total lack of support for older wired printers—and not quite the just-like-AirPrint solution we were looking for. To that end we turned to a commercial (but inexpensive) solution.