Connectivity for Wireless Personal Printer
 

Basic question - If I were to acquire a small personal printer for home use that is wi-fi enabled, would I need to have a network set up to allow my laptop to send jobs to the printer, or could the two devices communicate directly without the need for a network? (The laptop has Windows7 Home Premium).

Thanks for your help!

It depends on the particular printer...I think that some create their own wifi network and others join an existing one. Still others can probably do either.

Most will require a home network. It's a good idea to have a home network anyway, as there are a lot of benefits of a home network. You can buy a dirt cheap router / network device for $10 and up. This allows the devices to be assigned unique network addresses so they can talk to any other device on the network.

If you have broadband at home, then you definitely should have a router for sure. Better security, internet sharing, etc etc.