![]() Here are the most important things I’ve learned about keeping our Brother Google Cloud Print-ready printer working and our family users happy: Give the printer a static IP address “ Google Cloud Print” ( CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer That said, however, the Google Cloud Print settings have been a bit tricky and required our official family IT support guy (that would be me) to figure several things out with the help of Google that weren’t immediately apparent using the documentation which originally came with the printer. Proof of how we’ve been pleased with this printer came last week around midnight on Wednesday night, when our 10th grade daughter spontaneously said, “I’m so glad we have a good printer this year.” Reliability is important with three children and two educators in the house who frequently print items that are due/needed the next day, and the Brother MFC-J4420DW printer has rarely let us down. When I was shopping for the printer, I specifically asked for a model that supports both Google Cloud Print and AirPrint. I purchased the printer at a local Staples store at the start of the school year for about $175, because we really needed a home printer that would let my wife print directly from her Chromebook laptop. That is because this specific printer supports both Google Cloud Print and AirPrint. We can wirelessly print at home from our varied collection of MacBook laptops, Chromebooks, iPhones and iPads. We’ve had this printer about 8 months now, and overall it’s been fantastic. Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about the Mac since forever.The Brother MFC-J4420DW printer at our house actually IS working with Google Cloud Print now, but I had to make some changes to its setup today and thought I’d write a quick post to share what I learned. I will add that if you have a hardwired printer on a desktop Mac and are seeing this sort of issue, you should probably try unplugging and plugging it in again and check the cable for damage before you start fiddling with which printer you’ve selected too. Hope that helps you figure out what’s going on with your printer and get back to making hard copy as needed. If you really want to explore further – including enabling Google Cloud Print – then you can go to Settings and choose Printing from the menu. Sure enough, next time I go to print, it has the new printer selected in the Destination box and works just fine! Lots of choices, right?įor this fix, I’m going to choose “HP PageWide Pro 577 MFP”, knowing that next time I go to print in Chrome it’ll use the most recently chosen printer (e.g., fix the problem with HP_Pro_577_MFP). ![]() You undoubtedly have different printers available than I do, but notice the (typical) printer confusion here: There’s a local ‘raw’ printer, but there’s the same printer accessible through secure AirPrint too! And the Fax shows up as a different device too. Instead, click on the printer’s name on “Destination” to see all your options:Īs highlighted, you want to choose “ See more…” to proceed. What to do? One solution would be to use the option “ Print using system dialog” assuming that the printer is properly configured in MacOS X itself (which will need to be the case before you can fix the Chrome problem), but that doesn’t really fix the problem, it just sidesteps it. Still, I was viewing a page and pressed File > Print on the Mac just to see this error message in lieu of a preview: I recently had a similar hiccup on my own MacBook Pro, but I was trying to diagnose a connectivity problem on the network and disconnected and reconnected the printer too, so it was probably user error. If you see this happen multiple times then you’ve got a more serious problem but it’s likely that something got an upgrade (and remember, modern printers are on the network and could get driver updates without you even being involved) and that’s why it broke. How? Just delete the printer and re-add it as a new device. In this instance, there are a number of things that could have caused your copy of Google Chrome to be unable to see your printer, but while diagnosing the problem might be a pain, fixing it is easy. Part of the fun of computers is that there are random things that happen, leaving us puzzled and wondering what we broke.
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