Review on Lantronix XPS1002CP 01 S XPrintServer Cloud Print by Greg Bloom

Update: Given the ongoing research with Lantronix support and their engineers, I'm a little optimistic about raising my rating. It looks like the device is almost certainly capable of producing better quality prints. We're trying to fix driver issues (on the device) and we've been able to make significant improvements. This also applies to specific drivers (again on the device, not your Chromebook or Android) so your mileage may vary. Please take the rest of this review with a grain of salt and anticipation. I was very excited about this product and there is definitely something I liked. It's small and simple. The initial setup is very easy! It appears to be an embedded Linux device running a version of CUPS (the default printing system used in Linux and MacOS, you can see this by looking for some very familiar dialogs in the advanced settings). Unfortunately, it has one fatal, fundamental disadvantage - it is impossible to get high-quality prints with it. The problem is that at some point your print job will be rasterized (converted into an image, not a document). The result looks like you smoothed the curve by using grayscale to approximate the edges of the curve, and then reverted that grayscale back to black and white. You should end up with smooth curves at 600 or 1200 dpi, but instead you get tiny jagged wavy edges. This effect can also be seen on straight black lines. It looks really terrible. I tried different documents and images from Chromebook and Android phone. None of them look good. It's like turning your beautiful, high-quality laser printer into a 15-year-old inkjet printer. The photos look even worse, taking us back in time to the dot matrix era. There is a knowledge base article on the Lantronix support site that states that unexpectedly poor quality is a limitation of the Google Cloud Print service. This doesn't seem to be true to me in general, although it can be true when using the PWG raster format. I printed at 300 dpi from my Mac for comparison and the quality degradation when printing through xPrintServer is noticeable. You can take the existence of this article as a sign that Lantronix has no intention of solving the problem - the device may not be able to print from a source other than PWG raster. For another comparison, I set up the same printer that's already set up on my Mac in Chrome so I can at least print to it from my Chromebook when my Mac is also at home and online. Of course, that rarely happens in real life, so I bought xPrintServer. With this setting I was able to get very high quality prints (including 1200 dpi) from my Chromebook. If you download drivers specific to your printer (I have a Brother HL-2170W, in the web console click Printer > Printer driver) you can make Cloud Print think it can send PDF to xPrintServer (supported content types: Application/PDF) , but when you print to it for the first time, Cloud Print updates additional details to say "Supported content types: image/pwg-raster" and you get the same terrible quality as before. Lantronix isn't entirely honest about Google Cloud Print's limitations. It can print very high quality, just not through your device. If you just want to print something from your phone or Chromebook and don't care how it looks, you might like this product. But if print quality matters to you at all, look the other way.