Doug,
IMHO the HP consumer range is not all that good -- I am having good success with the Brother HL range of mono laser printers.
Given my own mixed network I bought a cheap print server (Hardly Normal bargain basement shop) to service my HL-1430 and connected using the (gulp) parallel port.
As I noted earlier, I already have an AirPort Express. A cheap USB-to-802.11 print server is still money I don't want to spend.
It is dead easy to set up lpr printing on the OSX machines and not much harder on the Wintel boxen.
I'm not phased by setting up LPR. I'm not the one setting this up, however. Now I'm not phased by setting up LPR over the phone with a semi-knowledgable person at the other end either.
But I need to know, *before* I send the AirPort Express, my daughter, her TiBook and a printer half-way across the country, that the printer I choose *will* work with both OS X and XP 2 using the AX as an 802.11-to-USB print server.
The brother web site has all the drivers you need.
Which still doesn't tell me if a particular Brother printer will work in the config I described earlier.
I know rendezvous is 'a good idea' but for simplicity and across platform connectivity then an lpr type connection will give less grief.
Actually, zero.conf (Rendezvous is simply Apple's name for their zero.conf implementation) is more than 'a good idea'. It's a return to AppleTalk-style discoverability of network resources in an IP world. And, like IEEE-1394, it's an Apple-sourced technology (basically: let's bring the ease of AppleTalk to IP without 1) proprietary add-ons like WINS or 2) breaking existing IP infrastructure) being given away via open source licensing.
<http://www.zeroconf.org/> has a useful outline of where the idea came from and what is being done to get AppleTalk-discoverability into the IP world.
Speaking for myself, I can't wait for zero.conf to spread. The deeper it gets into the Mac OS X and Linux the greater the usability gap these two OSes open up over Windows where it really counts: setting new stuff up to work with existing gear.
FWIW, many printers now come with zero.conf support built-in and every Linux distro I'm aware of ships with IPv4 link-local support built-in.
Both the Mac and XP boxes are quite happy to talk to an IP addressed print server with standard software. will the Ax only do rendezvous print serving or will it support lpr?
The AX does zero.conf and LPR. If the printer does zero.conf (many Brother printers support zero.conf already, BTW) then setting up the Mac side is trivially easy.
Whether I end up using zero.conf or an LPR queue on the XP box is a matter of broad indifference to me. I just need to be confident the printer will work via 802.11 with my sister-in-law's XP notebook and my daughter's TiBook before I lay down $400 - $600 on a printer.
By rights I should be able to get this sort of info from the folks who get paid to know this stuff (eg HP's and Brother's tech and sales staff or the staff at a local re-seller) but all I get from such folk is 'I don't know' or 'why not buy this extra widget from us instead: It works great Windows, although I don't know if it will work with that other computer'.
So I'm here imposing and relying upon the kindness of strangers.
TIA.
Regards,
Brian Forte. -- Brian Forte, <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Writer, editor, scripter, dangerous mind.
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