HP wireless scanning

January 9, 2026

If you’ve got a wireless printer/scanner combination by HP, chances are it will work, even if the device model is not on the working devices list. In my case, we have an HP Laser MFP 135wg in the household. I thought it might be difficult to get working, especially with my non-standard setup (above all things, archlinux is custom, after all). Once I looked at the SANE page, I thought I was in for a long one, since it doesn’t really talk about scanners on the network, but it was actually quite easy. So, after all these long-winded blogposts about me trying to get something working without really understanding them, here’s a quick one about something that was surprisingly easy to get working.

Step one: install the base minimum

I installed:

hplip these are HP linux drivers, but later testing showed they’re not needed when using the device over the network
sane “scanner access now easy”, which includes the scanimage program (for commandline scanning)
cups previously known as “common unix printing system” – because I may want to print with this too
sane-airscan which is needed to ensure discovery of network scanning devices

Step two: find scanner

Use airscan-discover (if you configured a host firewall, you may need to make changes, see archwiki), which outputs something like (where the X’s are numbers):

[devices]

HPBXXXXAXXXXAA (HP Laser MFP 131 133 135-138) = http://192.168.XXX.XXX:80/eSCL/, eSCL

HPBXXXXAXXXXAA (HP Laser MFP 131 133 135-138) = https://192.168.XXX.XXX:443/eSCL/, eSCL

Try lookng for the scanner:

scanimage -L

Step three: configure sane

I did this before actually checking whether it is needed, so it might even work without this step, but if you need to: open up the configuration file for sane-airscan, which by default is /etc/sane.d/airscan.conf and add the device:

“HPBXXXXAXXXXAA (HP Laser MFP 131 133 135-138)” = https://192.168.XXX.XXX:443/eSCL/, eSCL

Confirm your device is detected. Note that you can also exclude network devices here, if devices show up that you don’t want to see.

Step four: scan!

For a test-scan, use:

sanimage --format=png --output-file test.png --progress --device "escl:https://192.168.XXX.XXX:443"

of course, you can also use graphical interfaces to test – using scanimage directly eliminates some potential sources of error if things aren’t working.