What Was Happening
A customer in Barnes SW13 had a Canon Pixma TS4150 they wanted to print to from an iPad and an iPhone.
The printer was on the Wi-Fi. It reported itself as connected, and it worked. But when they went to print from either Apple device, the printer simply wasn’t in the list. Not greyed out, not erroring — absent.
That absence is the thing that makes this fault so frustrating, and it’s worth stating why. On a Windows PC, if a printer isn’t found automatically you can add it manually and point at its address. On an iPad or iPhone there’s no such option. Apple devices discover printers automatically or they don’t offer them at all. There’s no box to type into, no advanced settings to open, nothing for a determined user to do. Either the printer appears or you’re stuck.
Sound like your problem?
Bring it to our Putney workshop or message us a photo and we will give you a straight answer and a quote before any work starts.
Our Diagnosis
Because there’s no manual route on iOS, the whole question becomes whether the printer is discoverable by the Apple devices — and the answer is almost always about which network each of them is on.
We started by confirming what was already believed: the printer genuinely was connected to Wi-Fi and working. Worth checking rather than assuming, because a printer showing a connection icon isn’t always still associated with the network.
With that established, the fault had to be visibility rather than connectivity. Apple’s printing works by the device broadcasting a request for available printers on its local network and listening for responses. That discovery only works if both the printer and the device are on the same network segment, able to see each other’s traffic. If they aren’t, the printer can be perfectly connected to the internet and completely invisible to the iPad in the next room.
There are three common reasons that separation occurs in a home:
- The printer is on a guest network. Guest networks are deliberately configured to isolate devices from one another. That’s the correct behaviour for security and precisely wrong for a printer — anything joined to the guest network is invisible to everything on the main one.
- The bands are being treated as separate networks. The Pixma TS4150, like most home printers, connects on 2.4GHz only. Where a router presents 2.4GHz and 5GHz as two distinct networks, a phone sitting on the 5GHz network may not see a printer on the 2.4GHz one.
- The printer’s address has changed. After a router restart a printer often reconnects on a different address, which is enough to break the connection Apple devices had previously established.
We worked through these to find which applied, rather than reaching for a reinstall.
How We Fixed It
We confirmed the printer’s network connection was sound, then made sure the printer and the Apple devices were on the same network in a way that allowed them to see one another, and re-established discovery so the printer would be found.
Then we tested from both devices — the iPad and the iPhone separately, not just one on the assumption the other would follow. They connect independently and it’s entirely possible for one to work while the other doesn’t, so both needed proving.
We also printed real documents rather than just checking the printer appeared in the list. A printer that shows up and then fails at the point of printing is a different fault, and the only way to rule it out is to send a job through.
The Result
The Canon Pixma appeared normally on both the iPad and the iPhone, and printing worked from each.
No parts, no replacement, no reinstalling anything on the Apple devices. Short visit, and the customer can now print from the devices they actually use — which for a lot of households is the phone and the tablet far more than any computer.
Why This Happens
Printing from phones and tablets is now the normal case rather than the exception, and home networks haven’t entirely caught up with that.
Apple’s approach is built on automatic discovery, and when it works it’s genuinely excellent: no drivers, no setup, the printer simply appears. The trade-off is that when it doesn’t work there’s no fallback for the user. The design assumes the printer and the device can see each other, and offers nothing when that assumption fails. Compare this with a Windows PC, where you can always add a printer by address as a last resort.
The 2.4GHz limitation catches a lot of people out and deserves to be better known. Most home printers, including this Pixma, connect only on the 2.4GHz band. Manufacturers do this deliberately — 2.4GHz travels further through walls, and a printer doesn’t need speed. Meanwhile phones and laptops prefer 5GHz, which is faster over shorter distances. On routers that combine both bands under one network name this is invisible and untroubling. On routers that present them separately, your phone and your printer can end up on what are effectively two different networks in the same house.
Guest networks cause the same outcome for a different reason. They’re designed to isolate — a visitor’s laptop shouldn’t be able to see your family’s devices — and that isolation applies just as firmly to a printer accidentally joined to it during setup. It’s an easy mistake, because during setup the guest network is often the one with the password everyone remembers.
The address issue is the one most likely to make a working printer stop working later. Home routers hand out addresses that can change, and while computers usually cope by rediscovering the printer, the connection Apple devices had can break. If a printer that used to appear has vanished, and nothing has changed except perhaps a power cut or a router restart, this is the likely reason.
For a printer you want to rely on, giving it a fixed address on the network and making sure it’s on the main network rather than the guest one solves nearly all of this permanently.
Local Help in Barnes SW13
If you can’t print from an iPad or iPhone and the printer appears to be connected, it’s a network visibility problem rather than a broken printer — and there’s genuinely nothing more you can do from the Apple device itself, which is why it’s such a common call.
Barnes is a short trip from our Putney workshop and easy for us to reach for a home visit. Call 020 7610 0500 or arrange printer setup in Barnes — let us know the printer model and whether you have a guest network, since those two answers usually identify the cause.
