The xPrintServer Home Edition from Lantronix makes iPad & iPhone Printing easy without disrupting printing with your computer. The XPrintServer Home Edition is a device that simply connects to between your USB Printer Port and your Wireless Switch.
When I see devices come in for review that claim to be easy to setup, I want to make sure it does just that. The xPrintServer came with a Quick Start Guide, the xPrintServer not much bigger than a deck of cards, power cable, and Ethernet cable.
As instructed I connected my printers USB cable to the xPrintServer, connected the network cable to my wireless switch and powered it up.
It took about 60 seconds for everything to sync up, and then the X on top of the device started blinking slowly indicating it was ready to print. My printer was on their compatible printer list and it had no problem connecting up. I had read that even printers not on the list can be made to work you just need to talk with their support team.
On my iPad I loaded a photo an from the printer option windows chose my now networked usb printer. Clicked print and the image printed fine. I then proceeded to print some Google docs, web pages and various other apps that had a print function which all turned out great.
I had to re-add my printers on my computers though so be aware of this, the Macs where simple, if you are using windows you have to install the Bonjour Print Services which was a bit of a pain, but once loaded it detected the networked printer and added it. For those of you that do not already have a networked printer, this is a great way to get a older USB only based printer to be available on the network versus printing through a dedicated computer via a share. I had no issues with the device and the whole process took about 10 minutes to have all devices, and existing computers to be able to print through the xPrintServer.
One thing I was not able to test was with a multi-function computer. The existing multi-function printer I already have is a wifi based connected printer that was too far away from the network switch to do a test. Priced at $99.95 from Lantronix this is a great device to make printing available to iOS devices on those USB printers you have in your home.