Issue #0819/1 – Xerox has announced a new printer driver, Xerox Mobile Express Driver, which, according to Xerox’s product brochure, allows you to “print to any device in any location without tedious driver downloads and installations”. Unfortunately, it is not true for ‘any’ device, so we check out the driver in more detail and compare it with Hewlett-Packard’s existing Universal Print Driver.
Xerox’s press release is not much more circumspect in claiming that the driver “lets mobile workers print to any printer or multifunction printer (MFP) on a network – whether it’s a Xerox printer, or not”. In fact, the driver requires the printer to be PostScript compatible but the upside is that it is not restricted to network printers, USB printers are also acceptable.
This is one of those occasions when the marketing machine has been a little too enthusiastic and has stretched the truth a shade beyond reality. Xerox’s Mobile Express Driver (MED) looks to be a valuable addition to the Road Warrior’s armoury but it must be approached with some understanding as to its capabilities and limitations – in exactly the same way as with Hewlett-Packard’s Universal Print Driver (UPD).
While Xerox’s release represents an exciting step forwards for mobile printing, particularly as it is available as a free download, it should be pointed out that Hewlett-Packard has offered a Universal Print Driver for the last couple of years, with PCL and PostScript variants – both would need to be installed to ensure maximum versatility of printer selection.
Perhaps we should start by asking the question, why would we be interested in a universal/mobile printer driver anyway?
An example – as a business owner who is liable to be working while on holiday (sad character), access to a printer is often useful to me and occasionally critical. Needless to say, it is usually not feasible to carry a printer with me while working away from home base or on holiday (although not unknown – see article "Printing in the mobile office - Canon and Hewlett-Packard release new portable printers").
On one occasion many years ago, I had to prepare and deliver a quotation to a prospective client while away from the office in France for an extended period. This was long before the days when reasonably easy mobile internet access was possible, or a pen drive to an internet café would sort the problem.
The only solution was to go to the Mairie (town hall) of the village we were staying near and battle through the process of ensuring file compatibility, application compatibility, transfer of the file from my laptop to their desktop PC and printing of the document. It was a nightmare and successful only because of the exceptionally accommodating and helpful approach taken by the Mairie staff.
Even with the easy internet access currently available, the ability to deliver documents electronically rather than in hard copy and a reduced need to print many types of document, there are often occasions when a quick hard copy can be required while on location.
Perhaps that argument should really be reversed. Especially because of the easy internet access currently available, the need to obtain a hard copy of a web page (for instance), or other information, may be dramatically increased – as has the numbers of people travelling with laptops.
In fact, on a couple of overseas trips recently I was amazed to see several people (not just the one) making their way through the airport with mobile broadband enabled laptops open and running. It seems that even carrying an active mobile phone so that phone calls and text messages can be made/received at any time is not enough anymore. Now, it seems that we are going to have to be internet connected at all times – and on a full sized laptop, not just on a web-enabled mobile phone!
So, with Xerox’s MED, if I can locate a PostScript compatible printer in the vicinity of my selected destination (and can come to some arrangement with the owner to pay for the prints!), I will be able to print directly from my laptop using a wired network, a wireless network (if available) or a USB cable without having to worry about installing a driver for that printer. Brilliant!
Let’s start with the basics.
These two sets of drivers come from competing printer manufacturers and, therefore, approach the issue of printing for the mobile worker/executive from different standpoints.
For Hewlett-Packard, owner of the ubiquitous PCL page description language and a massive market share, the priority is to allow workers to print to a variety of Hewlett-Packard printers with as little effort as possible and reduced IT department involvement. Hence, the primary focus is on a universal driver for PCL – split into two versions, one for PCL5 and one for PCL6. In addition, Hewlett-Packard has a PostScript compatible universal driver so that users can also print to PostScript compatible printers.
But, and here’s the rub, the UPD drivers will ONLY support Hewlett-Packard printers.
Hewlett-Packard’s literature implies that the driver is designed for “basic printing in your business environment”. In other words, it is primarily for Hewlett-Packard customers with a mixed fleet of printers and MFPs that would otherwise need a variety of drivers to be installed on each PC. The UPD simplifies the operation by requiring only one driver for all Hewlett-Packard networked PCL machines.
However, I am bothered by the reference to ‘basic printing’.
Xerox claims that the driver automatically configures itself to offer users 100% of the features available on Xerox devices. Presumably this is true for fairly new devices but it appeared not to be true of the old Xerox laser printer we were using.
Where Xerox really scores is in the provision of a universal printing capability for any brand of printer, as long as that printer is PostScript compatible. There is even no exclusion on the basis of interface. Xerox’s MED is just as happy identifying and connecting to a direct connect USB printer as it is to a network printer.
Now – it should be clearly understood that most printers that are equipped with PCL, or PCL emulations, are also equipped with Adobe PostScript or PostScript emulations! So, in theory – which drivers should cover the highest proportion of installed printers?
Quite clearly, the single PostScript driver from Xerox, which can be used with any brand of PostScript compatible printer, networked or standalone, is more useful and can be used with a higher percentage of printers even than the suite of PCL and PostScript drivers from Hewlett-Packard that are limited to working with Hewlett-Packard network printers only.
As a mobile computing solution, the Xerox MED allows laptop owners a pretty fair chance of being able to find a suitable printer – at least within the corporate environment.
So, well done Xerox – a good concept.
Where the concept perhaps falls apart is where mobile workers are not visiting large enterprises, where there should be the guarantee of finding a PostScript printer, but are visiting smaller organisations and small businesses for which low-cost host-based, and/or inkjet, printers are frequently the device of choice. If a PostScript compatible inkjet device is found in a small business, it can pretty much be guaranteed that it will be an expensive device targeted at niche markets – i.e. graphic arts or professional photography – in which case they are not the type of machine to be using for casual printing as a mobile worker.
Sadly, the chances of a universal driver for inkjet printers being developed are pretty slim for a very wide variety of reasons. I would hazard a guess that anyone succeeding in that challenge could be worth a lot of money.
We have experimented with four laser devices (mono and colour, networked and USB) on two networks at our offices and can honestly say that both Xerox’s MED and Hewlett-Packard’s UPD are easy to install, easy to use and, on the whole, pretty effective.
Because of the nature of the operation, neither driver is perfect to the ideal world - and this is no specific fault of the drivers themselves. Because they are trying to address as many different printers as possible, it is not physically possible to include certain proprietary functionality.
This means that, even though Xerox can offer 100% functionality on its own devices, the options available in the driver ‘Properties’ are limited to a set of generic functions for non-Xerox devices.
These generic options are primarily: paper type, paper source, duplex printing, n-up printing, watermark, select mono/colour print; and document collation. All seem to be effective and the driver automatically detects whether the printer is duplex capable before offering duplex as an available option.
However, we actually found that, although the duplex option worked very well on a non-Xerox MFP, we had no joy at all in making a paper tray selection – and this was tried on three separate printers, one of which is Xerox branded (albeit fairly old)! There are certainly no advanced features available, such as print quality or colour correction.
Interestingly, the main hassle when using the Xerox driver to print to a USB printer is that every time a printer is connected to the laptop with a USB cable, the laptop assumes that it needs to load drivers and enters the New Hardware Wizard. Cancelling this is annoying but not of critical inconvenience – the potential benefits are much too great to be worried by that!
Hewlett-Packard’s UPD offers similar print options, which appear to work just as effectively. We were unable to try the paper tray selection option but this driver also allows the user to select a different source for a cover page.
Taking a step backwards, once the decision to print has been made and the computer launches the driver dialog, the user selects the universal/mobile printer driver in the usual way but is then required to click on ‘Properties’ in order to find and select the actual printer to use.
Both drivers approach this process is a similar manner, with the option to use an existing printer, search for a new one by automatic discovery or select network printers by IP/DNS name. The IP selection method is actually a very important factor in the driver because older printers do not have an IP broadcast capability, meaning that the driver will only be able to connect to the printer when it knows its address. No automatic discovery is possible. This applied to two of the printers we tried the drivers with and both printers could be found by entering the IP address.
With Xerox’s driver, printers can be categorised by location. When connecting to a new network, the driver automatically prompts the user for a new location name or offers to add printers to an existing location. If connecting to a network that is already identified as a location in the driver, the location is recognised automatically and the list of printers displayed is appropriate to that location.
This feature allows users to differentiate between, and select, printers sitting on different networks – for instance, printers based at each site of a large organisation or at each customer’s site.
If there is a downside to the Xerox driver, it is the fact that there is no error message in the event that a USB printer is not PostScript compatible. This situation can arise because the driver will discover all USB printers, regardless of their technology. Thus, it appears to connect to standard inkjet printers but, when a print job is sent to the printer, neither printer nor driver respond in any way.
While this is not particularly an inherent problem, it is annoying that the driver does not alert the user to the fact that the printer is not compatible and that printing is not possible.
As soon as the network interface is used though (inkjet or laser), if the printer in question is not PostScript compatible, the message “A supported printer was not found on port [IP address]. Verify the port value is correct and try again” is returned.
In our experiments, we received the same error message as above when searching the IP address for an old Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printer, despite the fact that it is PostScript compatible. Presumably it must be too old to be compatible with the Xerox driver. On a non-PostScript Xerox laser printer, everything appeared to work correctly until PostScript code printed instead of the page image! Again – annoying not to receive an error message, especially as this is the situation that causes vast volumes of paper to be wasted printing that code.
By contrast, even thought the Hewlett-Packard driver also finds all printers on the network in the automatic discovery process, and no obvious error is returned when the ‘Check Status’ button is clicked, as soon as the selection is OK’d, if the printer is not a compatible Hewlett-Packard network printer, the driver returns the message ‘The selected printer [printer name or IP] is not a supported HP device’, leaving the user in no doubt that no printing is possible on that device.
A successful connection is indicated by a big tick in a green circle when ‘Check Status’ is clicked.
Interestingly, the Hewlett-Packard driver will not even find a current PCL3-based Hewlett-Packard network inkjet printer (presumably if Hewlett-Packard were to equip this range of printers and AiOs with PCL5 instead of PCL3, they would be found). If an IP address search on the relevant port is performed, the message ‘The selected printer [printer name or IP] is not a supported HP device’, indicating that it knows that a printer is on the port but that it is unable to address that printer. One would have thought that the discovery process would at least find the printer and return an appropriate message.
Conclusion? Xerox’s Mobile Express Driver is probably the most versatile and easy to use and would be my preferred first choice at this point in time. It certainly configures itself automatically when the print dialog is accessed and lists only the printers available at that time. It is difficult to comment on the Hewlett-Packard driver from this perspective as we had only the one device to experiment with but it is unlikely to be as automated because it was necessary to do an IP search when connecting to that network domain for a second time – ie the driver did not remember that it had been connected to a compatible printer.
Overall, these drivers promise to be a wonderful productivity tools for those faced with the uncertainty of what printer model they may be able to print to – for whatever reason. I will definitely keep them installed on my laptop, ‘just in case’ and will watch out for updates that might improve the experience and broaden the operational scope.
I will certainly be sure to carry network and USB cables in my laptop bag!
~End~
