I had a similar problem recently and the linked post in the singular comment above didn't actually answer the question posed here (setting up Windows with Samba authenticated printer shares, NOT the other way around). I wanted to only allow authenticated access to printers shared from Linux. In addition, I'm running Ubuntu Server LTS, which means command-line only access (via SSH in my case) so most tutorials/guides I'm finding show the Ubuntu GUI and are therefore useless to me.
The [printers] section with the option printable = yes defines the mapping to CUPS. Setting browseable = no prevents this option from being displayed in printer lists. It's the actual printer spool for print jobs, so that makes sense. However, by default, anyone with a correctly configured printer setup pointed at and can access the Samba server has implicit access to print without privileges (i.e. anonymous access). To force authenticated access to the print spooler, I used the valid users = bob, joe, mary option.
Windows looks for the print$ share name for printers. The associated section [print$] declares browseable = yes, which grants anyone who connects to the Samba server the ability to see the available printers. Even though guest ok = no is the default, Samba still allows what I consider to be anonymous access to any printer. To force authentication, I used the valid users = bob, joe, mary option. If you want to hide printers from being seen in the first place from unauthenticated users, you can try using browseable = no and then use the include = /etc/samba/print.%U.conf option to change browseable = yes for specific users as per this Unix StackExchange post:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/245785/show-specific-samba-shares-only-to-some-users
Bringing it all together, /etc/samba/smb.conf now looks like:
[printers]
comment = All Printers
browseable = no
path = /var/spool/samba
printable = yes
guest ok = no
read only = yes
create mask = 0700
valid users = bob, joe, mary
[print$]
comment = Printer Drivers
path = /var/lib/samba/printers
browseable = yes
read only = yes
guest ok = no
valid users = bob, joe, mary
One side effect of requiring authentication that I ran into on Windows was that attempting to double-click on a printer to Open it (the default verb on Windows) as an unrecognized user caused an "Access Denied" message box to appear but was never prompted for credentials. Windows was probably passing along that user's logged in Windows credentials in that instance. Fortunately, right-clicking and selecting the "Connect..." option prompted for credentials. After connecting successfully, I was able to Open the printer, which asked me to manually set up my printer drivers since I don't attempt to deliver those via Samba and is beyond the scope of the answer to this question. Then I successfully printed a test page and all was well.
