How To Get Your Canon ImageRunner Printers to Work with OS X 10.6

Posted 10/25/2010 at 3:33pm | by Scott Rose

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All of the Macs at our company print to two very expensive network photocopier/scanners: the Canon ImageRunner 2270 and the Canon ImageRunner 3025. We just upgraded the office to Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, but there are no Snow Leopard drivers on Canon’s website! So now we can’t print at all! We called Canon, and they told us to downgrade to Leopard or purchase a newer photocopier because ours have been discontinued.

We’ve received several questions like yours (many of them irate at Canon) since Snow Leopard was released. So we decided to take matters into our own hands and contact Canon to see what the problem is. We phoned Canon several times and also got the same frustrating “downgrade to Leopard or buy a new photocopier” line. That’s really not an acceptable answer when you’ve invested $4,000-plus on a printer, so we continually escalated our calls over a series of weeks until we finally got hold of perhaps the only knowledgeable technician at Canon.

Once you install Snow Leopard drivers for your ImageRunner, you'll use this new configuration screen to add the printer to your Mac.

It turns out that there actually are Snow Leopard drivers for your ImageRunner printers. They’re just hidden on the Canon website, which is why you couldn’t find them. In its infinite wisdom, Canon decided to only list its Snow Leopard drivers alongside its very newest ImageRunner models, even though those very same drivers are compatible with nearly 100 older ImageRunner printers.

So the trick is to go to the driver download page for one of Canon’s newest ImageRunner printers, such as the ImageRunner 9070 and download the Snow Leopard driver, which is currently named UFRII_v2.10_MacOSX.zip. Open the ReadMe file that comes with the driver, and you’ll see a list of all 100 ImageRunner models that it supports.

Once you install the driver, please note that the configuration is completely different than it was in Mac OS 10.5. Within your Print & Fax System Preference, you no longer choose More Printers, but rather go to IP Printing and choose the LPD protocol. This is outlined in more detail within the updated user manual that comes with the driver.