It's much easier to setup if the printer itself is network capable, and not "shared" off of a host PC. Then you potentially have to deal with multiple driver versions, permissions, and keeping that PC on all the time. With a network printer, each computer connects to it directly.
That being said, you won't notice a difference in usage between G and N. Most quality home routers can support both at the same time, so worry about the actual features of the printer and related costs.
with a router configured for mixed mode, are you saying that both N and G devices would be running at N speeds? i thought it would occur differently. wouldn't it be more likely that the N devices would have to run at G speed then because the G devices would not be capable of running at N speed? i could be incorrect regarding this, since I am not very fresh on my networking standards.
This is true, if you are running in mixed mode it will slow down the potential speed of the wireless N devices because it must slow down in order to talk to the wireless G clients.
Max wireless LAN speed in mixed mode will be just 54Mbps, but if you run in 802.11n Only' mode you can achieve 300Mbps. This is a significant increase in wireless LAN speeds.
The problem is that most printers I've seen can only handle wireless G which forces the network to run in the slower mixed mode. For this reason I ended up using Ethernet for my printer.
GeneO is correct. Mixed mode means exactly what the wording suggests...mixed. N devices run at N speeds, G devices run at G speeds.
It looks like n speeds will drop while the g device is actively using the wireless while in mixed mode.
Since it is a printer, speeds only drop while sending data to the printer.
This is my understanding. The G devices and N devices run at their rated speeds when active, but all devices share a limited amount of bandwidth that is time sliced between them. Just like any device, the G device will use up some of the bandwidth available but it will use a bigger slice of the bandwidth for the same amount of data than an N device because its rate is lower. Therefore, the G device (or N for that matter) will only affect other device's rates when the available bandwidth is nearly saturated by the devices.
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