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I recently purchased an HP Deskjet wifi-enabled printer (model no. 3515). Set it up successfully as good as that both me (in the same network as the printer) as well as another person few miles apart from me (having different isp than mine) could print wirelessly successfully.

The printing across network (printing from a network other than that to which the printer is connected) has been set-up and tested successfully both through Google Cloud Print and HP ePrint Software.

However, when it comes to scanning across network, or cloud scan as we may call it, none of these two support, or even say anything about, it. Talking to an HP customer care executive about it was fruitless as i expectedly got no better answer than 'it is not possible'. Also, unfortunately, I have not found anything worthwhile on internet regarding this either.

What my understand is - if printing could be done wirelessly across network, so could be scanning. After all, in both we do roughly the same thing but in opposite direction. That is, in layman's terms, if i am not wrong, in printing we convert digital information into hardcopy document, and in scanning it is just the other way round.

Please correct me if am assuming too many things too wrong.

viv227295
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    Though not being from an IT background, somehow i strongly think that it could, even unofficially, be achieved. It just require a little tweak & trick here and there. Comm'on isn't any geek out there to take the challenge? :) – viv227295 Sep 25 '13 at 05:57

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HP ePrint is email based, i.e. the printer acts as an email client that polls a mailbox for print jobs. When you print to the cloud, your printjob goes to your printer's mailbox and the printer fetches the job from there. It is pretty much one-way, in the sense that you just send off the print job and hope it gets printed and there can be many different clients submitting print jobs to the same printer.

Scanning is much more complex and actually requires a fully working two-way communication, i.e. the computer is interacting with the scanner to tell it do to do a preview scan, selecting scannable areas/size, setting resolutions, etc. while getting instantaneous responses and data from the scanner. So it is not really feasible to do via a mailbox, and at least not via the printer's mailbox as you cannot read results from its mailbox.

You would think it would be possible for the scanner to send scanned pages to your mailbox, but I guess the implementation is just not there yet. There are some security implications, such as it would be a bad idea to start a scan job from a remote location, because then any bad guy could try to scan whatever secret document you happen to have placed in the scanner. But if you were to initiate the scan from the scanner and there select the email address to send the results to, it should be secure enough. I guess the developers at HP are saving some features for the next generation of multi-purpose devices so they can sell you a new device next year.. :)

krisku
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  • I can do the SCANNING thru all-in-one wifi-enabled printer i have giving command from my laptop WIRELESSLY. The only constraint is both the printer & the laptop should be connected to the same ISP/network/router. As long as i connect my laptop to some other ISP/network/router than the one the printer is connected to, the scanning will not work. It is just a matter of an ISP/network/router change here, how does way communication, complexity, or security comes into the picture? I think printing too has personalization, communication, and security issues as much as scanning has. – viv227295 Sep 25 '13 at 05:54
  • When you are in the same network, your computer can talk to the printer directly and then there are no restrictions. When you are in another network only printing works, because you are essentially sending the print job as an email to HP's server, and the printer reads the email from that server and does the printing, i.e. you do not have any direct connection to the printer. – krisku Sep 25 '13 at 09:24