D-Link DPR-1260 review

A printer server is a useful way of sharing a printer on a network without having to leave a PC on all the time.

D-Link's DPR-1260 lets you share up to four USB printers on a wired or wireless network, so it's a good choice for a small office or a home with multiple printers. It's also the first printer server we've seen to support scanning as well as printing.

Installation is simple. Once you've connected to the DPR-1260 via its wired port, you can connect to the web-based management and configure the wireless network settings. Unfortunately, there's no utility built in to scan for available networks, so you'll have to have to enter your wireless details manually. The print server supports WEP and WPA encryption, so it should work with most networks.

Configuring your printer is simple, too. Just plug it into one of the four USB2 ports. The print server detects the printer and displays its name on the configuration page. To add a shared printer, you just need to select the printer from the configuration page and a small application is downloaded and run on your PC. If you haven't installed the printer on your PC before, the application will prompt you for the location of the driver file.

This can lead to problems, though. First, not all manufacturers provide the drivers as a folder, instead providing a single executable file that has to be run. These files can require your printer to be connected to your PC. Second, even if you can install your printer by pointing the configuration application at the driver folder, you won't get all the extras that come with your printer and you may find you haven't got all the advanced options in the printer driver. For completeness, we'd recommend installing the printer by connecting it directly to your PC and then performing D-Link's network install.

The bigger problem with the DPR-1260 is that it doesn't work with all printers. The compatibility guide on D-Link's website goes so far as to say that Lexmark and Dell printers are not recommended. We can see why, as we couldn't get our Lexmark X5470 multifunction to work at all. The drivers installed correctly and Lexmark's utility warned us that the printer was running low on ink, but we couldn't get any pages to print. The X5470's scanner wasn't detected, either. We connected a Mustek standalone scanner, but this also wasn't detected. D-Link has a narrow range of supported scanners, so it's best to check the website for compatibility.

Once you have a compatible scanner, you can only scan through the DPR-1260's web-based management. This lets you scan an image to a JPEG or PDF file. You don't get full access to the scanner's settings, though, and have to choose scan quality from an arbitrary list of qualities: Highest, High, Medium and Low. You'll need to experiment with these settings and compare the results to a direct-connected scan.

The scanning might not be perfect, but otherwise the DPR-1260 is a good way of sharing multiple printers on a network, provided none of them is a Lexmark or Dell model.