HP ePrint

I have always kind of leaned towards HP for my home technology, from laptops to printers.  Especially with printers, as I have felt HP does an excellent job with their printers, and even creating network based printers.  However if you have been out in the stores recently you may have seen HP printers that are called HP ePrint Printers.  It is this line of printers I want to talk about.

So what is the difference between a regular printer and an HP ePrint Printer?  The answer is the HP ePrint feature of course.  What this means is, in addition to all the regular features the printer has or may come with, it also has the ability to register with the HP ePrint website.  What this will do is give your printer a special email address.  Anything you can email to this email address your printer will print for you.  This includes attachments as well.

The next question you might wonder is why does one need something like this?  Well if you are like me and use an iPhone or other smartphone device, this is a big feature.  As this means you can print to the printer by sending email from your device.  So basically any device that can send an email, can print to this printer, without the need for print drivers or configuration.  This is also great if you have a tablet device, such as an iPad or Droid tablet.  The other benefit this provides is you no longer have to be on your local network to print to your printer. Being email based you can be any where in the world, and as long as you can send that email, you can print.

Being able to print to your printer by sending an email seems very cool, but the next thing to think about is security.  Does this mean that anyone with your printer’s email address can print to your printer?  Well the answer is yes, by default the HP ePrint website allows any email sender to print to your printer.  However they do have the option of turning this off, and creating a list of allowed email addresses that can print to your printer.  This way the emails have to come from one of the specified email addresses in order for it to print.

So if you are in the market for a new printer, you may want to consider getting an HP ePrint Printer if would like to print from other devices, than just your computer.  Staples has a good selection of these printers, and a very informative web page about this as well.  http://www.staples.com/hpeprint