Cloud Experience with Home Printer with Epson WF-3640

Epson WF-3640 Printer

Just bought a new Epson WF-3640 Printer from Costco for about $100 bucks, after my old HP MX 890 horrible printer stopped working. Still discovering Epson WF-3640 Printer's features. After using for few days, I am quite impress with the quality, speed and features it provides. Especially, its Cloud Print and Scan capability is at par with what we have at work. At a high level, other than traditional wired features, it provides Email Print, iPrint through Mobile device, Scan to Cloud and Remote Print. All these features enhances the user experience to an another level where it let's you synch with other Cloud Services we use in our day to day life. My favorite, which I would use the most, is Email Print, Remote Print and Scan To Cloud services.

Overall, I would recommend this small, inexpensive printer for personal use. It is great if you would want to upgrade or want to have a better printing and scanning experience.

I have had two HP Printer (MX 89X series) from last six or seven years. The first one broke. Got another HP Printer two years back and it broke again. Horrible quality. On top of that, it was a printer with an experience of just get the work done somehow. We had to struggle a lot with its driver, Wi-Fi, wireless printing, paper feed, scanner, and what not. But, let's just say it was a piece of crap and work just got done.

Installation and Setup

Just like any other good product, installation of this printer was a breeze. I was able to print and scan through wired connection to my laptop within 30-45 min or so. I was able to connect this printer to my Wi-Fi but could not get up and running with Epson Connect Service. I had to call their support and it was a quick 20 min call to resolve the issue.

What was the problem: In order to avail Epson Connect service you would have to register at https://www.epsonconnect.com. I downloaded the driver but could not get through the registration process because it was not able to detect my printer. Technically, my laptop and Printer is connected to the same Wi-Fi. So, you could connect to printer using its IP Address http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, which you could obtain from its setup menu, through a browser. The registration program does the same thing behind the scene. The problem was that I did not realize that I was on VPN and because of that my machine was not in the same network as Printer. I was able to realize this when I tried the printer IP from my other home laptop. Accessing printer through its IP Address simplifies registration and many other admin processes. Once you reach to admin console of the printer you could do all sorts of settings and configuration directly from there. Here are the list of services and their description on how to.

Email Print

After successful registration, my printer was automatically assigned an email id within epsonconnect.com domain. Later I reconfigured this email Id after logging into https://www.epsonconnect.com to my own convenient emailId. My new email Id looked something like meaningfulname@print.epsonconnect.com. I test fired few print through this service and it worked really great. My wife tried this from work and it worked. I could not find any latency in this service. To make this service more secure, I blocked this service to a selected email address, so that it will print only if the print request is coming from the listed email a/c. I created a docx file and sent and email with this file attached and empty email body. Within 30 sec I got a response that either email body is empty, file is not attached or attached file is not supported. On further investigation I found following limitation or guideline of email service. I tried this couple of time from my office email Id but it did not work. When I tried my gmail account, it worked fine. [ToDo: There is some setting or something that print request sent through exchange email, for me, doesn't work.]

Note the following when sending an email.[1]

You can enter up to 100 printer's email addresses.

Cannot print with specifying a printer's email address in the Bcc field.

You can attach 10 files.

You can attach files up to a total of 20 MB including the body of the email.

The following file types are supported.

Word (doc, docx), Excel (xls, xlsx), PowerPoint (ppt, pptx), PDF, JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG, TIFF

Except for the body of the email, text files (plain text) cannot be printed.

Zip compressed files cannot be printed.

Short Message Services (SMS) unique to mobile phone providers are not supported.

Scan To Cloud

Scan to cloud activation took no time. Once I was registered at http://www.epsonconnect.com, I just had to follow few simple steps to link my Google Drive and Email account where I would receive my scanned document. Scanned to two different location, one for Google Drive and another for email, and both worked like charm. Response time was as if my Printer was connected to my laptop.

Epson iPrint App

Printing through iPhone app was another quick setup. It took hardly 5-10 min downloading the iOS App and setting up the printer. You want to make sure, your phone is on the same Wi-Fi on which Printer is connected.

Google Cloud Print Services

You can enable this service after accessing the connected printer at http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. (check your printer configuration to get this IP Address).

All of the following setup were done easily. I would need more time to investigate the nitty gritty details of these services and which one would be best suited to me.

Remote Print Driver

AirPrint Setup

Wi-Fi Direct Setup

References

[1] Epson, Email Print, https://www.epsonconnect.com/guide/en/html/uses_1.htm