The trouble with Canon

[Julian Hebbrecht]

i recently bought a small B&W Canon Laser printer. The latest driver for this printer had to be downloaded from the (Japanese) Canon website which is not very easy to figure out. I called the Canon support service. They were very polite and guided me to the correct driver. However, the installation didn't work no matter what I tried so I called back to  the supportservice. They guided me again and again through the installation process - which was very simple actually - but didn't work. They had no experience with Macs and couldn't help my any further.

So I made an appointment with the Apple genius bar people in Shinsaibashi, took the driver with me on a memory stick and asked them if they could show me how to install it. The simple installation process went without a glitch so I was very puzzled because my iMac was running the same OS 10.6.4 as the one the people at the Apple shop. Back home, it still didn't work. Mystery.

Back on the phone to the Canon support service. That afternoon, there happened to be a guy on the phone who was a Mac user and he told me that this printer driver could not be installed on a Mac running an English system. He suggested that I switch to the Japanese system and try again. This iI did and then the installation worked but the printer still didn't work. So back to the support service.This was already going on for several days - time in which I couldn't print out anything.

The girl at the Canon support center guided me through the installation process several time, each time deleting the installed driver again and again but no cigar.
As a last resort she told me to restart my Mac with the Japanese OS active - and lo and behold, the printer now worked. But now everything was of course in Japanese which was a pain in the you-know-where so I restarted again after switching back to the English OS and the printer still works - knock on wood.

So in case someone buys a laser printer from Canon (don't!) maybe this will save you a lot of hassle.

[Jimmie]

So in case someone buys a laser printer from Canon (don't!) maybe this will save you a lot of hassle.

That's a pretty sad tale. My guess is that Canon has decided that Apple's rule that there can be only one driver for the whole world for each printer (with language modules that switch automatically) is just too, uh, logical for them.

I bought a Brother laser myself and my experience installing that was pretty much the polar opposite of yours. After inserting the disc, the first question on the screen was "Japanese or English?" (It auto-detected Mac.)

It's been trouble-free for about five years now and works like a charm.

Obviously, Brother is trying harder than Canon.

Jimmie