Help with choosing wifi or wired home network printer

Good Morning all.
I need to get a basic laser printer for home but a getting a tad confused.
My current inkjet is wifi and is just "detected" by our two laptops and if anyone comes to stay.

Whilst looking around I notice a LOT of people have issues with their wifi printers dropping out/ not connecting/ going to deep sleep especially if only used occasionally - which mine will be. So I looked at ethernet ones. But according to a lot of sites I need to install drivers on each laptop and go through various configuration hoops not ot mention problems if guests want to use it.

Why cant I just connect it directly to the router and it be found the same as a wifi one????

Or is the usb to wireless converter hub the way to go?

many thanks
Woody

Edited by ukwoody (Mon 12-Jun-17 09:26:57)

If your current printer works well with WiFi, then I would recommend that you buy the same make. There is really no difference whether you connect to the printer via its own WiFi or via a WiFi router. In either case, and even if you connect with an ethernet or USB cable, any computer that wants to print will need drivers for the printer installed.

I've always had good results with HP printers, but there are many other good makes.

My canon inkjet and Brother laser are both wi-fi, Never really had much of a problem with the Wifi part, but it depends what you want to do. My laser and inkjet and both connected to my computer via USB, i only use the Wi-fi for the tablet, phone or laptop.

How basic a laser do you want? i have a brother HL-3150CDW, which is a colour laser, ok it is a colour LED printer, it have Ethernet as well as Wi-fi and USB connection, and have duplex printing. It is pretty good to be honest.

There is a model below it that do not have the Ethernet or duplex printing and one above it which is just a bit faster. But it depends on how much you want to pay,.

This is one that will often depend on the OS of the machine/device that you're connecting from; a lot of more recent printers will be automatically recognised and installed by Windows 8.1/10. I think it's far easier to use WiFi - you can place the printer anywhere, and unless your access point is poor then there should be no real issues with it. It's more than fast enough in terms of transmission speed.

At home we recently replaced an old HP OfficeJet AIO with a Brother DCP-9015CDW, both on WiFi; it's been solid so far, Windows 10 finds the driver automatically, all's fine. I rarely power it off since it goes into sleep mode and doesn't use much power anyway, which also saves us from waiting for it to power up from cold again. Only downside is that it has no scanner...

windows 10 in a pain in the neck, it keeps trying to install it own drivers for my printers, i will have to sort that out.