Printing from an iPhone to a cheap inkjet: three paths that actually work
Three ways to send a PDF from an iPhone to a £50 home inkjet without a subscription, without a plug-in, and without giving up on the page looking right.
Call the printer in this piece a £48 HP DeskJet 2720e or an Epson Expression ET-2850 bought on sale at Argos. Both are entry-level inkjets. Both talk Wi-Fi. Both are sold on the assumption that you will subscribe to the manufacturer's ink delivery service, which is the single most expensive way to buy ink per millilitre in the United Kingdom. This piece is about the opposite route: a cheap inkjet, a plain Wi-Fi network, a phone, and a PDF. Three paths get you there reliably.
Path one: AirPrint, and why it almost always works
Apple's AirPrint has been built into iOS since 2010. It is the first thing to try, it needs no app, and if your printer was made in the last decade it almost certainly supports it. To test: on the iPhone open a photo, tap the Share button, scroll to Print. The Printer field shows a list of AirPrint-capable devices on the current Wi-Fi network. Your printer will appear if it has been configured on the same network.
What goes wrong, in order of how often: the printer is on 5 GHz and the phone is on 2.4 GHz, or the reverse. Most home routers now present a single SSID that merges both bands, which breaks AirPrint discovery because the Bonjour protocol AirPrint relies on does not cross the band boundary cleanly. Fix: log into the router admin and split the SSIDs — give the 2.4 GHz band its own name, join the printer and the phone to the same one, and the printer appears.
The second thing that goes wrong is the HP+ enrolment. HP's cheaper 2020s inkjets ship in "HP+" mode by default, which requires an HP account and a working internet connection on the printer, and refuses to print if the subscription lapses. Even if you plan to use third-party ink, the enrolment nags for weeks. Opting out at setup is possible but Apple's interface and HP's guided setup fight about it. The HP support page on opting out of HP+ is the one to find before you plug the printer in.
Path two: Mopria, if your printer is not AirPrint-compatible
The Mopria Alliance is the industry's equivalent of AirPrint — a standard protocol for direct printing from phones to networked printers. Every mainstream UK printer brand supports it: Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark, Samsung, Xerox. On iPhone there is no native Mopria support, but the manufacturer's app usually implements it: HP Smart, Epson iPrint, Canon Selphy Layout, Brother iPrint&Scan.
The practical path with Mopria is: install the manufacturer's app from the App Store, open it, let it discover the printer on the Wi-Fi network, open the PDF or photo through the app, and print. Why would you prefer this to AirPrint? Two reasons. One, the manufacturer's app usually exposes more printer settings (duplex, tray selection, print quality presets) than AirPrint does; AirPrint exposes a minimum set. Two, when AirPrint silently fails to discover the printer, the manufacturer's app often finds it anyway via a direct Bonjour or IP-based scan.
The risk with Mopria is that the manufacturer's app frequently includes promotional nagware, cloud-service upsells and account enrolment prompts. Install, use, mute notifications, move on. The Mopria certified-printers list is current and worth checking before buying.
Path three: iCloud Drive + AirPrint from Files, the one I actually use
The best method for PDFs — and in my view the most reliable — is to keep them in iCloud Drive and print from the Files app rather than from whatever app made them. Open Files. Navigate to the PDF. Tap and hold. Share. Print. AirPrint.
The reason this works better than printing from the app that made the PDF is that app-generated print jobs often go through the app's own print dialog, which has its own bugs. (Gmail's print from the iOS app has been broken intermittently for years. The LinkedIn app's print dialog loses the second and later pages of a multi-page PDF. The Apple print-from-iPhone support document notes the AirPrint path as the supported one.)
Printing from Files bypasses all of that. You are handing a complete PDF to the system print dialog and letting iOS render it. Margins behave. Page breaks hold. Fonts embed properly. If you print anything from an iPhone more than once a week, make the habit of saving to Files first and printing from there.
What ink to actually buy
This is adjacent but worth stating. HP, Epson and Canon original cartridges for budget inkjets run £20 to £40 for a black-and-colour set that prints maybe 150 pages at ordinary coverage. Third-party compatibles — the Pelikan, Tonerink and Red Bus brands common in UK stationers — cost £8 to £15 for the same yield and print indistinguishably on plain paper.
The manufacturer will tell you compatibles void the warranty and clog the heads. The first claim is partially true under UK consumer protection law — a manufacturer cannot void warranty for using a third-party consumable unless the consumable itself caused the fault — and the second is a mix of marketing and a few genuine QC lapses. The safe pattern is: buy one set of compatibles, print the weekly school-admin PDFs for a month, see how the print looks. If it is fine, carry on. If the heads clog (a specific banded or blotchy pattern), buy originals and remember that the saving was not worth it.
Paper, briefly
80 gsm is the commodity office paper. 90 gsm is a visible step up in how much a printed PDF looks and feels like an official document. 100 gsm is what you want for a CV or a letter you are sending to anyone who will judge it. All three are cheap in the UK: a ream of 500 sheets of Navigator 90 gsm is about £7 in most stationers. An inkjet will handle all of them.
The one weight to avoid is "inkjet photo paper" for text documents. The coating is designed for photo ink saturation and drinks solvent in a way that bleeds text. Keep photo paper in its own tray or the single-sheet feeder, and use plain 90 gsm for everything else.
The one hardware upgrade worth £20
If you print ten or more pages a week, a USB-C-to-USB-A OTG adapter and a wired direct connection from the phone to the printer solves every network issue described above. iOS supports USB printing via the OTG adapter and the printer's own driver, and the result is as near to instant as home printing gets. Apple's USB-C accessories compatibility document lists which adapters work without a powered hub.
It is not pretty. It involves plugging a cable in. It does bypass about six categories of Wi-Fi bugs in one move. If AirPrint refuses to find the printer and you have spent more than an hour trying to make it, the £8 adapter will have saved the hour on the next urgent print.
An honest ranking
Use AirPrint first. Use the manufacturer's app as a fallback for anything AirPrint cannot find. Use iCloud Drive + Files as the habit for anything you print more than once. If none of those works on a given afternoon, print to PDF, email yourself the PDF, open on the laptop, print from there. Life is short.
And consider — honestly, consider — whether a laser printer at £90 would save you more grief per year than the £40 inkjet. If you are printing black-and-white documents more than photos, the answer is yes. We have a longer piece on the inkjet vs laser calculation if that is where this leaves you.