Deploying Printers - Shared from Server vs. IP Direct

Hey r/sysadmin

This turned into a hot debate in our morning scrum yesterday. So I'm curious what the sub's thoughts are...

We're moving infrastructure to a new datacenter, which mean new print servers. Traditionally, we've always deployed printers to users (via. GPP) as shared - i.e. \\\PrintServer\Printer1.

This has always worked *generally* fine, but one of the most common complaints we get is **print speed**. We have a LOT of small remote offices (with really iffy internet), plus a lot of people printing via. redirected printers in RDP. Given some print jobs spool up to be huge, this can mean a lot of data going back and forth over the wire multiple times for a single print job (eg. user prints from RDS to redirected (local) printer (goes over WAN), from local printer to print server (over WAN), from print server back to the actual local printer (over WAN).

Since the old print servers are going away, we have to re-deploy them all with GPO/GPP anyway. We were thinking of redeploying as TCP/IP (direct) instead of shared. The big benefit being the client prints directly to the printer. The big downside is no more central management of print settings (although we don't really do much of this anyway, other than defaulting to B/W to save costs).

What do you guys do at your companies? Within the helpdesk and sysadmin teams, there were a lot of split opinions going both ways. There's clearly pros and cons both ways.