An HP Printer

An HP Printer was Originally Posted on November 9, 2010 by lavarock

Many of you know I used to work at HP. With that said, I just bought an HP D110 printer (also known as CN731A). It is a scanner and printer and called an E-All-IN-One. The “E” is the operative word for this blog entry, E as in E-PRINT.

At HP we networked many of our printers together so that we could print to almost any printer in the company. That capability is almost in your hands with E-Print.

I am far from an expert in the technology of this option, however here is what I did with the new printer just received today.

I opened the box and set up the printer. After powering it up and adding the ink, I let it connect to the router (I did not connect it to any PC). The printer connected to HP and downloaded a printer update, all wirelessly.

Then I went to a nearby PC and logged into HP’s website and created an E-Print account. This assigns an email account to the printer and allows me to send text, documents and photos to the printer. It also allows me to block any or everyone from being able to send to my printer. The email is a cryptic one and not easily hacked for spam. If need be, I can push a button and change the email address in just seconds.

I then brought up an email account I own and sent a message to the printer email address and within 10 to 30 seconds, the text was printed! The printer can be changed so that emailed items are printed in grey-scale or color but for now I am allowing color.

Astute readers may think fro a minute here and say “well, what is the differenc between this and a FAX machine?” because they are seem similar. A fax machine needs a phone line, this printer is stand-alone if you want (or USB to a PC), the data printed can be in color or grey-scale, there is no charge to access the printer (a fax machine might be a local call or an international call) and the resolution of this printer is “printer resolution” and not low quality like many fax machines are.

The printer was on sale recently and cost me less than $70. Soon most HP printers costing more than $100 will have this capability.

There are options and applications to allow you to automatically push data to the printer overnight, so that you could have a newspaper printed for you to grab and take with you on the go.

If you want, go search HP’s website for E-Print.