If you need to print to a printer that’s connected to your Mac from Windows—either a dedicated PC or a virtual machine running under VMware Fusion or Parallels—there are many solutions for doing so.

To print to your Mac-connected USB printer from Windows, here’s all you need to do:

1. Make sure your printer works as expected in OS X.
2. Launch System Preferences and go to the Sharing pane. On the Sharing pane, check the box for Printer Sharing, and (if you have more than one locally-connected printer) check the box for the specific printer you’d like to share.
3. Switch to your virtual or real Windows machine, and download and install Bonjour for Windows. If you need more help with the installation, Dan’s linked article above has more details.
4. After installing Bonjour, you’ll find a new Bonjour Printer Wizard on your Windows desktop. Launch it, then click Next to get to the Browse for Bonjour Printers screen.
5. In the Shared Printers section of this screen, you should see your shared Mac-connected printer. Select it, then click Next.
6. On the Install Bonjour Printer screen, you’ll probably see the Manufacturer as Generic and the Model as either Generic/PostScript or Generic/PCL. Choose Generic/PostScript first—if that doesn’t work, you can try again with PCL later. If you want this to be your default printer, check that box, then click Next.
7. Click Finish; you’re done.

Source:macworld.com/article/132263/2008/02/macwinprint.html

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Unfortunately, one of the least used features on all-in-one multi-function printers and heavy duty copier/scanner/printer machines is the scan function because it’s simply too complicated. If you’re lucky, IT will set up your email account as a preconfigured setting and they’ll teach you how to scan a document to your email inbox. If you’re geeky enough to go and figure out how to key in your own email, then you might be one of the other two people in the building that uses the scan functionality. But most people simply keep paper copies and do everything the way they’ve always done it by making more copies and storing them in a file cabinet if they’re organized enough. Well Samsung might actually change this with their direct to USB multi-function printers.

One of the features I’ve searched long and hard for is a scan-to-USB feature. I’ve asked representatives from Xerox and every other copier company that offers multi-function copiers with little luck. I’ve asked HP for this feature and no luck there either. But last week as I went through Samsung’s CES booth, I thought I’d check out their color multifunction printers and I notice a nice little USB port in the front of them. The Samsung representative explained that the USB port can act as a print source or scan destination and I thought FINALLY we’ve made scanning easy.

The color multi-function printers in question are the Samsung CLX-3160 (pictured left) and the yet-to-be-released CLX-6200. Both devices can print an assortment of document types such as PDF, JPEG, TXT, etc directly from USB memory. Both devices can also scan documents and save them directly to the USB memory. This means that instead of trying to figure out how to configure an email destination which is difficult without a qwerty keyboard or figure out how to dump to a scan to a network file share, you simply dump the scan to USB. Now you just take those stacks of documents and shove it in the feeder and it will get digitized on to USB memory!

The difference between the Samsung CLX-6200 and CLX-3160 is that the 6200 can print all four colors at the same time whereas the 3160 does color one color at a time. This means that the 6200 prints color more than four times faster than the 3160 and it also prints black and white a little faster. The 6200 will also print full duplex two-sided output automatically which cuts down paper consumption in half if only people can be educated on using it. The 3160 is available now online for roughly $450. The 6200 will launch at the end of this quarter for $200 more than the 3160 and should be well worth the price as a workgroup all-in-one. Personally I wouldn’t mind having one of these near my cubical.

Source: blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=955

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Saving money is a good thing. If you need a new printer and you're on a tight budget, it's surely one of the key issues that you care about. The trick is in knowing how to save money while still getting a reasonably capable printer. Choosing a proper printer can have a far reaching impact on a business' bottom line.

"Start by assessing printing needs," Orr said. "How much are you printing? Do you need color? Don't just look at just the up-front cost—cost-per-page can affect your bottom line. A lot of the sub-$500 laser printers and consumer-oriented inkjets have really high cost-per-page that adds up over time."

When you move into higher-end workgroup printers, starting at $1,000, you can get the color price down from 20 cents and up with consumer-oriented inkjets to around 10 cents, and monochrome down from 3 to 4 cents to 1 to 2 cents per page, Orr said. Consolidating to fewer, larger devices also means more paper and memory capacity, and possibly better print quality, according to Orr.

Inkjet printers suitable for personal, SOHO (small office/home office) and occasional printing start at under $50, and all-in-one print/copy/scan devices below, and inkjets for heavier use and multiple users, are still under $250, Cavacetti said. Laser printers can start below $100. Workgroup-class machines, says Cavacetti, include networking capabilities, higher paper capacities, and the ability to expand by adding more drawers, trays, and other features and options.

Great Printers for the Price

This roundup gathers an assortment of printers—including both stand-alone and all-in one (AIO) choices as well as both ink jets and lasers. They don't all qualify as inexpensive in absolute terms. (The Canon Pix ma Pro9000, for example, sells for $499.99 direct.) Nor is each one necessarily the best in its category (even though the Pro9000, at least, is good enough to have earned an Editors' Choice for low-cost pro sumer photo printer). But each is cheap for its category and delivers enough bang for the buck to qualify as a bargain.

Low prices almost always go hand in hand with cutting some corners. The difference between a printer that's disappointing and one that's impressive for its price lies in which corners the manufacturer chose to cut. With the Canon Pix ma iP1800, for example, Canon kept prices down in part by leaving out the automatic alignment feature you'll find in most ink jet printers and opting for manual alignment instead. This is a bit of a pain, since you have to realign the head every time you change a cartridge. But it's a lot better choice than compromising on speed or output quality.

Similarly, the Dell Color Laser Printer 1320c offers limited paper handling, with a default 250-sheet paper tray and no options. That won't be a problem in most cases, however, because 250 sheets is enough capacity for a typical personal printer or for a small office with light-duty printing needs.

Source: eweek.com

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Laser printer is a type of computer printer that produces high quality text and graphics on plain paper. Like photocopiers, laser printers employ a xerographic printing process but differ from analog photocopiers in that the image is produced by the direct scanning of a laser beam across the printer's photoreceptor.

Laser printers has many advantages over other types of printers. Unlike impact printers, laser printer speed can vary widely, and depends on many factors, including the graphic intensity of the job being processed. The fastest models can print over 200 monochrome pages per minute.The fastest color laser printers can print over 100 pages per minute.

Very high-speed laser printers are used for mass mailings of personalized documents, such as credit card or utility bills, and are competing with lithography in some commercial applications.The cost of this technology depends on a combination of factors, including inflation, the cost of paper, toner, and infrequent drum replacement, as well as the replacement of other consumables such as the fuser assembly and transfer assembly. Often printers with soft plastic drums can have a very high cost of ownership that does not become apparent until the drum requires replacement.

A duplexing printer (one that prints on both sides of the paper) can halve paper costs and reduce filing volumes. Formerly only available on high-end printers, duplexers are now common on mid-range office printers, though not all printers can accommodate a duplexing unit. Duplexing can also give a slower page-printing speed, because of the longer paper path.In comparison with the laser printer, most inkjet and dot-matrix printers simply take an incoming stream of data and directly imprint it in a slow lurching process that may include pauses as the printer waits for more data.

A laser printer is unable to work this way because such a large amount of data needs to output to the printing device in a rapid, continuous process. The printer cannot stop the mechanism precisely enough to wait until more data arrives, without creating a visible gap or misalignment of the dots on the printed page.Instead the image data is built up and stored in a large bank of memory capable of representing every dot on the page. The requirement to store all dots in memory before printing has traditionally limited laser printers to small fixed paper sizes such as letter or A4.

Most laser printers are unable to print continuous banners spanning a sheet of paper two meters long, because there is not enough memory available in the printer to store such a large image before printing begins.

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