Printer sharing is beneficial to many users as they can share a costly and higher quality printers. Printer sharing can be done in several different ways in network. The printer queue holds print jobs until any currently running print jobs are finished and then automatically sends the waiting jobs to the printer. For example a printer connected to network. This method uses printer queses always have a printer server. That print server handles the job of sending each print job to the printer.
Another way to share printer on a network is that each workstation accesses the printer directly. For example a printer connected to the network just like network workstation.
Advantages:
- Reduces number of printer you need.
- Share costly high quality color laser printer.
Disadvantages:
- Reduces server performance if printer connected to server.
- Each user must wait its turn, if many users request printer at once, in print directly connected to network.
So as we can see, printer sharing is essential in any computer network. It reduces the cost immensely and it is much easier to maintain one printer per network than a printer per workstation.
