Can someone explain to me why we even use print servers?

Ok, I have a great environment that I am going to use for this scenario: Car Dealership with 7 brands. Each shop has 4+ printers upwards of 15 in our largest shop (think one in each corner so the furthest anyone had to walk for a print job was maybe 4 bays over). We had sales areas, service areas, parts areas etc., customer and non-customer facing areas you name it. So when I started we had what you described, PCs with locally installed printers. Managing these devices in an environment where computers moved around bays from day to day, then you have new installs, driver updates/changes. Back then there was 64/32bit issues etc. Next add on the complexity of wanting to have the ability of managers only to print color and users to only print black where available. There are settings with different trays on different printers etc. Then we had the oddball things that would happen. We had printers that would all of a sudden start printing windings on the top line of sheets of paper and push 60 of them or so at a time, randomly. Tracking down those was impossible. Then you have users adding their own printers which we had to have at the time which meant that users were adding WDS ports and not TCP/IP ports which always just fails for whatever reason. So what we did was: 1. I abstracted all the printers to their own subnet. This VLAN was pushed across the campus and all printers lived in the same IP segment now which was good for all the manufacturer tools which don't get me started on. 2. Set ACLs to not allow computers to connect to those printers directly. We only allowed our management servers and such to connect to them for monitoring SNMP etc. 3. Install Print Server 1. Centralized management of drivers 32 and 64 bit. Super easy to do. 2. AD Deployment. not sure why they are not deploying for you. Good thing though is if not then it's always easy to just hit the \\\\printserver\\ share and double-click the printer you need and all the permissions that are set will allow the printer to be installed or not. You can then have one printer with say 5 different "Printers" installed on the server for your different needs: tray settings, color settings, etc. etc. etc. 3. print queue management is centralized. 1. You can also offset things if you need for your environment. For example you can set one printer in accounting to say only print from 7-9pm and the other one to print from 7am - 6pm where the 7-9pm printer is for large reports that need to print but don't need to be print during the day and take up time. 2. If a printer dies you don't need to do anything but go into the print server and change the port to a working printer (assuming you have similar printers, like you use HP laserjet 4400 in accounting and have 3) and maybe have to manually restart one job. 4. Print Accounting 1. Great that you have 4 copiers that you can set print accounting on... I can do the same as well as report on the usage and have those automatically send that to management/accounting/where ever. Those will apply across the entire scope of printers. So if I have a sales associate that is in another office today he can print something and it will pull from his allotment. If he needs more, there will be a change log created for that etc. for those that need that. 5. End Goals possibly 1. The end goal that I was trying to push would be like some universities have it where you have scanning stations and printing stations. you walk up to a scanner, badge your credentials, and scan documents that the users can manage. When they print it prints to a central storage location. They then walk up to any printer, badge in, and print the documents they want. Yes I know COPIERS have this capability now but again that is decentralized management or you have to have all the same/similar devices where with a solution like this you can have a mismatched set and all of the accounting still happens. Some of this obviously would require extra software pieces but the first 3 can be done out of the box, the 4th there are free tools that you can leverage to do this with. The last part would be an entire overhaul but the overall goal. There are so many other small things that have been discovered over time. For example we found that somehow a network monitoring utility that was performing weekly scans was causing Lexmark printers to print random stuff when it would do discovery scans. Strange stuff like that just went away because things no longer had access to the printers directly.