Using iMac with wireless printers, scanners.

Question

Hello. I am not sure how the wireless system works and wonder how I would hook up a wireless printer and/or scanner. Would I require a router to do this.
Any comments on how wireless works, etc would be appreciated.

Answer 1

There's latency and there's bandwidth. Bandwidth refers to how many bits per second flow through a communication channel, and latency refers to the delay in putting information or taking information off a channel. An analogy might be a highway with a speed limit of 60 mph. That's the bandwidth, cars (packets of information) have a top speed that puts a cap on traffic flow. In practice though, people drive different distances (routing information through network hardware), and need time to merge (encrypt/decrypt wireless data packets), which adds delays and slows down how quickly a given amount of information takes to travel from point to point. That extra time is latency. Wireless network connections have a certain amount of overhead that slows things down. The individual packets of information travel quickly, but they tend to stall a little bit on transmission and reception, which makes the realized throughput slower.
Now, your wireless connection, assuming you're using 802.11n (the fastest standard) will top out at 144 Mbps under the best conditions. Your USB2 cable connection will top out at 480 Mbps. Both have different amounts of overhead in operating, so in practice, you'll find USB2 only about 2 - 2.5x as fast as WiFi, but that might be annoying if you're doing something like printing full-color brochures.
While a wireless router, like an Apple AirPort or Time Capsule, might simplify the setup and permit you to add other computers / guests later, it's not strictly necessary. You can configure your Mac to create an "ad hoc" wireless network simply by turning on wireless networking on your Mac and selecting "Create Network..." from the AirPort menu. Once the network is created, you can turn on your printer and give the Mac and the printer a few seconds to find each other. After that, you can add the printer in the printer preferences.
As far as the scanner sharing goes... There are different means of sharing scanners over a network. In order for it to work, the manufacturer has to design the printer's on-board software to support them. Unfortunately, that's still not all that common, and it's rather hard to tell from the labeling on the package. You're best off doing some research to find a scanner that supports it. The alternative, of course, is to plug a computer into it and use the computer to share the scanner. Both OS X and Linux are very good at that (Linux is a little tricky to setup for this). There are some cases where Windows machines can share scanners with Macs, but that is something that's also kind of dodgy.