# Printer Problem Tiger 10.4.2 And Canon Bjc-85



## Richard57 (Aug 27, 2005)

Just bought new ibook G4 with Tiger 10.4.2. Have Canon BJC-85 which works fine with previous G3 ibook and direct connection via USB. Downloaded new driver from Canon website version 1.7.1 and although computer seems to recognise the BJC-85, it won't print anything. Can get it to print in Gimp-Print v 5.0.0-beta2 but it is slow and prints so light as to be unuseable. Any suggestions? Thanks

Richard


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## Satcomer (Aug 28, 2005)

Delete all reference to the printer in the Application: Printer Setup Utility. Then re-add the Printer with the proper driver and see if that works.


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## Richard57 (Aug 28, 2005)

I tried that previously and have reaccomplished. The utility loads the printer quickly via USB, when you go to the get info section, it shows the printer and the most current driver. I even tried the maintenance section and requested clean print head which it seemed to accomplish. But, it still won't print. It simply does nothing when asked to print and the printer shows inthe dock with the ! symbol and the job in the queue. Trying start job or resume does not work. Any other ideas? Thanks

Richard


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## Satcomer (Aug 28, 2005)

Then maybe a program called Printer Setup Repair may help.


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## mattmann (Sep 18, 2005)

Hello,
I just had the same problem, and attempted to use Printer Setup Repair.
But the real solution for me was something else: I had a black cartridge in the printer, but the default setting in the printing preferences was for colour cartridge! by changing it when trying to print (the dialog box where you specify the printer you want to use...) in the Quality and Support screen (I'm translating from French, it could be something else), the printing would then go smoothly and I could save it as a"black and white" configuration.
Hope this helps for you as well.


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## Richard57 (Sep 22, 2005)

Dear mattmann,

 It works! Thanks very much for your advise as this was very frustrating for me. Thanks again!

Richard


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## whalerick (Dec 31, 2005)

mattmann said:
			
		

> Hello,
> I just had the same problem, and attempted to use Printer Setup Repair.
> But the real solution for me was something else: I had a black cartridge in the printer, but the default setting in the printing preferences was for colour cartridge! by changing it when trying to print (the dialog box where you specify the printer you want to use...) in the Quality and Support screen (I'm translating from French, it could be something else), the printing would then go smoothly and I could save it as a"black and white" configuration.
> Hope this helps for you as well.




Your solution worked for me too! Simple fix, but kind of obscure and very hard to find. Glad I checked with this forum first.

Rick


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## HandyMac (Jan 20, 2006)

Many thanks, folks, for providing a solution to a problem that's been driving me nuts. I moved up to 10.4 a few months ago, and have been unable to print with the Canon BJC-85 since then. It starts the printing process, then stops the job for no apparent reason. If I try to start it again in the Print utility (the Canon printer icon that appears in the Dock when printing a job), it starts again, then stops. I thought it might have been a conflict with some third-party tweak, so I tried from another partition that was "clean." Same result. Then I installed the BJC-85 driver on a new Mac mini with an unaltered factory setup. Same result. I tried the printer with my iBook, running 10.3.9. Worked fine.

So I did an Internet search and found this page, which reminded me of the problems the BJC-85 has had with OS X all along. I've been using the BJC-85 since ca. 2000, when I got my first USB PowerBook (previously I'd used its ancestor, the StyleWriter 2200, a.k.a. BJC-70, since it first came out, around the time of the PowerBook 5300); although Canon later produced OS X driver packages for it, they've never worked as well as in the classic Mac OS. (For instance, there's never been an OS X driver for the clever IS-12 scanning cartridge.)

In the classic Mac OS (as I recall) whatever cartridge type the user selected (either color or black) became the default selection for the next print job. In the OS X BJC-85 driver, the default cartridge is color, and if you'd rather use a black cartridge you have to (laboriously) select it each time you print. In 10.2 and 10.3, if the cartridge in the printer didn't match the type selected in the document's print dialog, the job would stop with a "wrong cartridge" alert. In 10.4, this behavior has been "upgraded": it just stops the job, without a "wrong cartridge" alert, and refuses to do anything further, leaving the user frustrated and mystified.

The solution, as noted here, is to select the installed cartridge in the print dialog (in "Quality & Media" under the "Copies & Pages" popup menu) before clicking Print. Then it prints fine.

However, there is a further solution, which I researched (with the aid of a couple of online forums like this one) back in 10.2: You _can_ change the default cartridge type if, like me, you prefer to use the black cartridge most of the time. Here's how: In the Print dialog, select "Quality & Media" under the "Copies & Pages" popup menu, then select "BJ Cartridge: Black". Then in the "Presets:" popup menu, select "Save As..." and name your new configuration "Black Cartridge" (or whatever you like). Then *press the option key* when you click the Print button. This sets your "Black Cartridge" configuration as the default, and the next time you go to print a document, it'll already know you have a black cartridge installed. You can, of course, set up any kind of special configuration using the various panels under "Copies & Pages", then save it under Presets for future use.

Just keep in mind that now you'll have to change the settings back to Presets: Standard if you put a color cartridge into the printer, or it'll do the same thing: stop the job with no alert. Hmm; now it appears that if I change a document's Print dialog back to Standard, and print (with a color cartridge), then open the Print dialog again for that document, it'll still be set to Standard. If I close the document and open it again, however, the Print dialog will come up with Black Cartridge, as it will for other documents (since I've set the default as above). I guess this is a clever feature convenient to the user, who might want to print a special document with a special Preset configuration more than once in a session. 

The bottom line is this is an "old" (in computer terms) printer, that's never been thoroughly updated for use with OS X; if 10.5 finally breaks the driver, Canon might not want to be bothered to update it further. My BJC-85 was paired happily with my 1999 ("Lombard") and 2000 ("Pismo") PowerBooks, but I'm planning to get a newer one (probably the i90) to go with my new 17" PowerBook and 900MHz iBook. The later models have only one cartridge configuration, so this confusion won't arise; they're also much better for printing photos and other high-resolution work.

In the meantime, another tweak, for those inclined: If you go to RAILHead Design and click on "icons" you'll see a set named "Canon Hardware v1 (2003-10-14)" about halfway down the page; download it and you'll find an icon for the BJC-85 therein. You can use this to change the generic Canon printer icon that appears in the Dock when you print with the BJC-85. The easy way is when you're printing something, click & press on the printer icon in the Dock, and select "Show in Finder"; a window will open showing the printer utility, and you can paste the icon onto it. The utility is in ~/Library/Printers if you want to find it manually.


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