The screenshot above shows a typical network printer as discovered by our Discovery product. In this case, it's one of those odd-looking Hewlett-Packard CB395A color printers, on the second floor of the wooden spaceship in Solana Beach. At the top left of the screen, you'll see the usual sorts of things you might expect a discovery product to find: the printer's hostname, make and model, serial number, etc. But the rest of the screen might contain a few surprises for you.
At the top right, you can see the printer's operational status. A printer that's down for any reason (out of ink, out of paper, broken, etc.) will report non-operational. Just below that is some performance information — the pages-per-minute that the printer is capable of. This particular model doesn't report this information, so we leave that blank. Below that is the kind of paper (sheet, roll, etc.) the printer uses, and again, this particular model doesn't report it.
Next is something that's particularly useful if you're leasing your printers: the use count. This printer has made 15,703 "impressions" since it was first put into service. Different printer makes and models might report "pages", "sheets" or some other unit. Duplex printers often use impressions as the unit, and if a page is printed on both sides, that will count as two impressions. In any case, the use count is what your vendor is charging you by — and this figure gives you a way to audit their invoices.
Just below that is the resolution of the printer, in this case 600dpi by 600dpi. Printers with variable resolution capability (as this one has) generally report the "native" resolution of their print engine — in other words, the best they can do.
Toward the bottom of the screen is a list of all the "supplies" this printer reports. In the case of a CB395A, that means just the toner cartridges: yellow, magenta, cyan, and black. For each cartridge, you can see its current level as a percentage of the max level, and you see the max level as well. Our black cartridge is dangerously close to needing replacement. You could easily make a report of all printers getting close to needing replenishment, using this table.
In that list, you see that there are "class" and "type" fields (Consumable Supply and Toner in our example). Some printers — especially the big, fancy "document centers" — report all sorts of things in here. For example, a Minolta document center in the wooden spaceship reports how full its stapler and waste toner bin are, and how much paper it has left (in reams!).
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