HP ePrint

HP ePrint (free) was one of the first Web-based services, if not the first, to let you print through the cloud to specific printers from a particular vendor?HP, in this case. The ePrint Web site, HP ePrint Center, assigns the printer an email address. You print by sending files as email attachments, a trick that can come in handy occasionally for almost anyone. That makes ePrint worth exploring if you already have a printer that supports it. More important, if you need cloud printing on a regular basis, and are considering an HP printer, you'll want to know if ePrint can do what you need it to do before buying the printer. The short answer is that it may or may not.

The first printer that supported ePrint was the HP PhotoSmart e-All-in One D110a ($100 street, 3 stars), which I reviewed in the second half of 2010. At the time, I took a quick look at ePrint to confirm it worked, but didn't run a rigorous set of tests. Since then, HP has added a number of printers with ePrint support, including the HP LaserJet Pro CM1415fnw color MFP ($449 direct, 4 stars), that I used for this look at ePrint. According to HP, most of the comments here should apply to all ePrint printers, but there may be some minor variations from one printer to the next.

Setup
Normally, you'll set up ePrint as part of the process of installing the printer. The main requirement is that you need to connect directly to your network, whether by Ethernet or Wi-Fi, with the network connected to the internet. The service won't work over a USB connection to your computer.

Initial setup assigns the printer an email address with random characters for the user name, but you can easily change it to something easier to remember. Other options let you limit ePrint to accepting emails only from specific senders, set it to print only in grayscale (although jpg and other photo formats will still print in color), set the paper size, and tell it whether to print jobs sent through Google Cloud Print. (You'll need to enter the printer's ePrint address in your Google Cloud Print account first.)

Also worth mention is that if you have more than one ePrint capable printer, you can add them all to the same HP ePrint Center account as well as set the options for each printer separately.

One setup issue I ran into was an error message on the ePrint Center screen warning me to update the printer's firmware "to avoid interrupting service."? The message didn't go away even after I ran the update, although it didn't keep anything from working. At this writing, HP is still checking into this issue.

Basics
HP ePrint has some important limitations. First, it will discard emails with more than 5 MBs of attachments, whether they consist of one file or several smaller files, and it will discard emails with more than 10 attachments, even if the total size is much smaller than 5 MB. It will also discard any image that would print at less than 100 pixels per inch.

Second, it can handle files in only a few file formats. The list includes Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in both the current and most recent previous formats (both DOC and DOCX for example) plus TXT, HTML, and PDF. In addition, it can print BMP, JPG, PNG, GIF, and TIFF image formats. This is almost the same list of formats Epson offers for Epson Email Print (Free, 3.5 stars) but with TXT and HTML added.

Third and most important, is something HP doesn't seem to mention anywhere except on its ePrint troubleshooting page: ePrint provides convenience printing only.

As anyone who remembers convenience copy features on thermal paper-based fax machines knows, that's another way of saying you shouldn't expect too much. The troubleshooting page goes on to say that formatting may differ from the original documents, and in some cases you may need to print directly from your computer to print missing images. Given that large caveat, however, ePrint performed much better than expected.

How Well Does it Work?
For my tests, I printed the same files we use for testing printers, which includes a selection of files in most of the business application formats ePrint can handle?Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF?plus TIF and JPG image formats.

Not only did all of the pages print, but the only issue I saw for the business application formats was that Excel graphics were consistently a bit smaller?by perhaps 5 percent?than the same graphics printed directly to the printer. I didn't see the same issue with PowerPoint or PDF files, and ePrint maintained all the font styles and sizes correctly on our text quality tests. Impressively, it also maintained all of the line breaks correctly, even for our most heavily formatted pages?something that HP warns it may not do, and that Epson Email Print didn't do.

I ran into a more serious issue for image files, which ePrint insists on printing at 4 by 6. More precisely, according to HP, the size will vary somewhat depending on your printer's country code setting, which is based in turn on the language setting you chose during installation. But it won't print the files at letter size in any case. In addition, on both TIF and JPG images, ePrint cut off a small slice of the image from each of the four edges.

What these results make clear is that ePrint works much better for business application files, including PDFs, than for image files like JPG or TIF, unless you specifically want to print photos only in 4 by 6 format. This could be a serious issue if you want to print, say, a document scanned in JPG format. You can sidestep the problem by scanning in PDF format or converting the file to PDF before sending it. However, the workaround wouldn't be needed if ePrint let you specify the size for printing image files, which is something you can do (although without as much flexibility as I'd like) with Epson Email Print.

For the most part, HP ePrint works well enough. It will let you print files from your cell phone, say, or send a file to print elsewhere at higher quality than you'll get from faxing. And if the only image files you want to print are 4 by 6 photos, it's useful for that too. As my tests show, it doesn't print everything exactly the same way it would if you were printing directly to the printer, but it works better than you might expect from HP calling it a convenience feature. Overall, it does what it promises to do, and, with the notable exception of image file print size, it prints well enough for most purposes.

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