DSC Secure Networking

It is early in the morning, there is a line of clients waiting to check out. You hit the print receipt button in your management application, but nothing comes out of the printer. You sigh and clear the print queue, accepting this is an unavoidable consequence of network printers. Or is it?Traditional network printers accept commands from your computer and use their internal processor and memory to compute the necessary head movements and ink/toner levels to generate a page. A “host based” printer uses your computer’s internal cpu and ram to generate the page. This is what causes the print queue to jam, especially if a large job or many jobs are sent to the printer. Doing these computations are very costly in resources and as such, these printers should never be installed on a server and shared. Large jobs or many jobs can quickly overwhelm the server and bring printing to a halt. These printers are fine if you have a small network and computers are directly connected to them.

Why is this done? The main reason is cost. Leaving out the “brains” of the printer can cut $50-100 off the price, making them more attractive, but causing a nightmare for IT in organizations with more than 5-10 users. Unfortunately this is not well documented in printer marketing materials and makes it very hard to tell if the printer you are buying is host based or not.

How to tell? The best way to go to the printers support page and see what kind of drivers are available. If the drivers say something in them like PCL5/6 or Post Script/PS, then your printer is more than likely not host based. Another way is to dig into the printers specifications, if the print processor has some speed value (i.e. 500 mhz) then it is most likely not host based.

Having these problems at your company? Be sure to contact us, and we will find a non host based solution that will work for you!

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