Is Your Printer Ready for Windows 7?

With Windows 7 officially available, complaints about lack of support for printers likely won't be far behind. But the good news is that you have a much better chance of moving your printer to Windows 7 without serious problems than you had going from XP to Vista. Granted, that's not a particularly high bar to clear, but after all the problems with printers and Vista, both Microsoft and most printer manufacturers have made an effort to make the move to Windows 7 easier. Judging by my tests, they seem to have succeeded. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean there isn't anything left to worry about.

Dell 1320c

A laser printer can be better than an inkjet if you print more text-heavy documents than photographs - the cost of each printer page is generally lower from a laser than from an inkjet.

Even better, colour-laser printers are getting cheaper all the time. The Dell 1320C is a colour-laser printer with both USB and network connections so you can plug it straight into a computer or plug it into a router to share it over your home network.

Print Magic for iPhone

The objective of Print Magic is simple: print from your iPhone to one of your network's printers. The idea behind this $7 app from Wellala is just ambitious enough: print, one at a time, text or graphics that have been copied from another app, or Web pages, or photos. And though it's hard to be sure where the "magic" comes in, it may be in the fact that this app, unlike others that enable you to print from the iPhone, does not require any server software to be installed on a standalone Mac.

The objective of Print Magic is simple: print from your iPhone to one of your network's printers. The idea behind this $7 app from Wellala is just ambitious enough: print, one at a time, text or graphics that have been copied from another app, or Web pages, or photos. And though it's hard to be sure where the "magic" comes in, it may be in the fact that this app, unlike others that enable you to print from the iPhone, does not require any server software to be installed on a standalone Mac.

Print Magic does all of these things. The one thing you have to do on your Mac is make sure that Printer Sharing is enabled via the Sharing panel in System Preferences. Then you install the app on your iPhone (and you subsequently reboot your iPhone, per the instructions, and wait for about 30 seconds). At that point, the app can print to any printers you have on your network. In my case, Print Magic quickly recognized both my Brother HL-2140 laser printer and my Epson Stylus CX9400Fax inkjet, which are joined to my home network via a MacBook running Snow Leopard.

Home Printer Buying Guide: How to Choose the Best Printer for Your Needs

Inkjet or laser? Do I need an all-in-one? What is PictBridge? Do I need a network capable printer? We answer these common questions and help you decide which type of printer suits you best in our home printer buying guide.

Essays. Coupons. Last-minute directions to Grandma’s house. Whatever you need to print, there’s a home printer that can do it. And intense competition among competitors like HP, Lexmark, Canon and others has ground prices such absurd lows that you can now walk into a store and walk out with a brand new printer for $60.

But selecting a home printer among so many options can be tough, especially with all the convoluted terms that can complicate the process. With that in mind, we’ve put together a quick-and-dirty guide to selecting a home printer, with simple explanations of the most common terms and our recommendations for a majority of users.