Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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53 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best One I Could Find, December 19, 2006
Okay. It isn't perfect. Installation isn't as easy as it should be. Instructions aren't as good as they should be. Some printers work with it, and apparently some don't.
But go look at the ratings on all the other print servers. You'll see the same problems. I tried at least three others, and couldn't get any of them to work. I've been able to successfully get this print server to work with an Epson R300 (USB 1.1), a Canon MP830 all-in-one(USB 2, print only), and even a Lexmark Optra T610 laser printer(parallel, with a USB-to-parallel adapter from Belkin).
Printer manufacturers have gone nuts with bi-directional information going back and forth between the printer and the computer. The result: really pretty printer drivers that give you loads of information and options, but depend on the printer being physically connected to the computer. But when you want to easily share that printer with a bunch of other people (especially a bunch of people with laptops), it's much more difficult. Either everybody has to swap cables, or you buy a print server--and give up the pretty driver screens that pop up to tell you to buy more ink.
The D-Link DPR-1260 is the only one I could find that actually listed compatible printers on the box. They say that they tested with 100 different printers. I believe it. Their competitors don't seem to have done nearly as much testing.
If you aren't comfortable setting up a wireless router on your own, or if you needed help installing your printer the first time, don't buy this. If you can figure out what the d-link is doing by setting ports on your printers to print to an IP address, give it a try.
If the market had some better entries, I probably wouldn't rate this with 5 stars. But it appears to me to be the cream of the crop.
Update (12/2007): We've had it for about a year, and we've had trouble a number of times. It repeatedly loses settings. If I could reduce the number of stars, I'd give it two or three.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Horrible Setup, Lousy and Incomplete Docs, Prints Well, Scans Not So Well, May 31, 2007
Pros:
Combination wireless 4 port USB print server, scanner interface, and single port bridge. So far, the bridge's single ethernet port has worked flawlessly. Printing, once I got past the configuration nightmare, works great using a Kyocera FS-1010 laser printer and a HP-6110 Office Jet MFP from either Win XP or Linux/CUPS.
Supports scanning for some HP and Epson products, but not all. Check the D-Link web site and users' web reviews to see if yours is supported. Ditto for printers.
Works with some "problem" printers that other USB print servers either can't handle at all, or handle poorly. This unit replaced a D-Link DP-311U that had to be reset after every print job on my FS-1010. A SMC 2621W-U wireless print server would not work at all with that particular printer.
Supports WPA and WPA2 encryption. Anything less is really not secure. This has allowed us to retire a separate WEP encrypted wireless system that we used just for printers.
Works with most OS's, including Linux. Once it is set up, it doesn't know or care what operating system you are running, at least for printing.
Cons:
Absolutely the worst setup possible. Out of the box it only works with DHCP. No default fixed IP whatsoever, even after a timeout. Wireless encryption must be off. SSID must be "D-Link" This thing's setup requires that your wireless network conforms to its requirements, instead of the other way around. It is absurd.
Scanning is browser based, not HP or Epson native, and it doesn't work properly with all browsers. Linux is worse than Windows. IE and Firefox worked OK for me on Windows, Opera did not. Nothing was 100% on Linux. Scanning resolution was less than the scanner was capable of, even at the highest setting. White tone scans to a light blue color.
Completely inadequate documentation. Most of the set up info in this review is either not mentioned, or is buried in useless garbage. Nothing at all on browser javascript requirements for scanning.
User interface inadequate. There is no signal level indicator. You can't tell how well the unit is receiving, other than the wireless LED id lit. The printer wizard doesn't always provide an error message when it is unable to function. It just returns and sits there silently. The pages require a manual refresh to update. It does not work properly with all browsers.
No telnet interface. [ If you don't understand that, you won't care; it's a command line thing. :-) ]
Other Points Typical Of Wireless Print Servers, Neither Pro Nor Con:
It can't work with so called winprinters, also known as GDI printers, or host based printers. These cheapies lack internal smarts, and rely on Windows for ALL their processing. That's not D-Link's fault.
Ink level reporting and fax functions of multi function devices aren't supported, as D-Link states.
The USB ports are for printers only. They can not handle other USB devices.
A printer driver has to be installed on every PC on the network for EACH printer connected to the print server, unless there is no need for a particular PC to print to a particular printer. A printer instance (print server connected printer) also has to be created in the Printers and Faxes folder, or its equivalent, on each PC. This can be a lot of work and seems to be frequently misunderstood.
The Basics Of How To Set Up A DPR-1260:
This is the stuff that is either missing or not readily apparent in the documentation.
1. Your network MUST have a DHCP server running. If you don't know what this means, you almost certainly have one running already.
2. Either set your wireless to unencrypted and broadcast an SSID of "D-Link" (caps matter) OR connect an ethernet cable between your DPR-1260 and your router/hub/switch. I recommend the latter. That way, it's less likely that you will end up with your print server connected to your neighbor's unsecure-default-settings D-Link based wireless network, which is entirely possible.
3. If you DID NOT use the cable method, the wireless LED on the unit MUST be on solid to proceed. That indicates that the DPR-1260 has associated with your (you hope) wireless network and can get an IP via DHCP. If not, recheck steps 1 and 2.
4. Follow the Install Guide's procedure for connecting to the print server, which might work, OR log into whatever box has the DHCP server and note which IP was served to the DPR-1260. Paste the IP into a browser to bring up the print server's user interface, which will work.
If you have the print server cabled to the network, you should be able leave it there for the rest of the setup (except firmware updates) if you like. Otherwise, connect a PC to the print server's ethernet port.
5. I strongly recommend that you assign a fixed IP to the print server, so that you can always find it with a known IP address that can be bookmarked. Naturally, I also recommend you use WPA encryption or better on your network, and change its SSID to something other than D-Link.
6. If the printer wizard doesn't work properly, reduce the security settings on IE. Other browsers don't seem to work here, BTW. The print server will download a windows executable, which will run on your PC and set up a wireless printer instance. It works best if you install a standard driver first, so you may have to temporarily move the printer to the machine first, or vice versa. Linux users use CUPS, instead. It is much, much easier.
Final Thoughts:
The javascript that drives the user interface shows a lot of errors on browsers that can report that sort of thing. It appears that D-Link has written the scripts for Internet Explorer instead of using standards based code. They need to fix this.
They also need to fix the ugly light blue/gray that passes for white in the scans.
My unit came with firmware v1.20. I updated to v1.21. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the update did not reset the unit to the factory defaults. Hopefully, further update releases will improve scanning and the UI. This is badly needed.
D-Link should absolutely provide a documented default fixed IP after DHCP timeout in the next software release
If you have a D-Link based wireless network running no security and all the original default settings, the DPR-1260 will probably work right out of the box, and you will think it is wonderful and give it a five star rating. ;-)
On the other hand, if the last paragraph doesn't describe you, then you have some degree of work ahead of you. How much depends on your networking knowledge, and to some degree, how well we users have written our reviews, which is a good indicator of how poor the documentation is.
Two stars for the functionality it does have. Nothing for setup, documentation, or user interface.
Our wireless is almost 100% D-Link. Nevertheless, they have convinced me to look elsewhere for wireless products in the future. No wireless device should require that the network be made insecure in order to install it, even temporarily, and nothing should be so poorly documented.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
I am a network engineer: couldn't make it work with HP LaserJet, September 18, 2007
At home, I have the most basic windows wireless network possible. Nothing fancy -- I do that all at work. I just want stuff to work so want the easy route. So I got an HP LaserJet 1018 -- a home USB model, similar to some we have at our office, and this wireless print server.
It was not terribly bad to set up, assuming you know a lot about networks, wireless, and so on. The "wizard" is quite lame, and the diagnostic support is non-existant (no errors, or logs, or anything to help tell what's working or not). I was able to get it working fine with my wireless network without too much pain, but the last (presumably simple) step of plugging in the printer to the USB port and printing resulted in one of two states: either the print job just stuck in the print queue, or (after scanning the support site and trying a suggestion for a related printer) would just print into nowhere. No errors, no messages, no nothing.
I tried with another printer and had exactly the same result. I sent detailed info to the support email address, and got a single "try this and report back" message in response, two days later (not even an attempt to solve, just to diagnose). It was far easier to return this bad product to Amazon than to do further battle.
I suggest you look elsewhere and save yourself more than a few hours.
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