Works flawlessly with Mac Snow Leopard

I wrote this review to help Mac OS X 10.6 users. If you are a Windows user please read the other reviews of this product.



This is a high quality versatile quiet well thought out well built all-in-one printer. As with other brands the included software is pile of unnecessary mediocre ugly looking confusing mess. Canon makes a mistake by not offering a driver only installation which would allow us to use the printer and the scanner without installing their proprietary software suite. I am set out to correct their mistake...



Connecting the printer to WiFi is very simple just navigate in the printer's setup menu on it's LCD select your network and type in the password. The blue WiFi LED will confirm that the printer is connected.



To be able to print wirelessly you have to have the latest drivers.To install them forget about the CD in the box (it has OS X 10.5 compatible drivers only) and the 13 page "Getting Started" guide to install stuff you don't need. Just download the latest drivers from the Canon USA website. Go to Canon USA :: Downloads :: Consumer Products :: Multifunction :: Photo All-In-One Inkjet Printers :: PIXMA MP560 grab and install these files:



- MP560 series CUPS Printer Driver Ver. 10.26.1.0 (Mac OS X 10.5/10.6)

- MP560 series Scanner Driver Ver. 15.4.1 (Mac OS X 10.3/10.4/10.5/10.6)

- ICA Driver (Mac OS X 10.6)

(the version numbers might change when updates are coming out)



Once the printer drivers are installed on your Mac and it's connected to the same WiFi network as the printer just go to System Preferences / Print & Fax / + (add printer) and wait a few seconds. You will see a "Canon MP560 Series Bonjour Scanner" and a "Canon MP560 Series_NNNNNN0000000 canonijnetworkr" printer listed you can add them and you are ready to print and scan! When adding you can edit the name to make it look a little bit nicer. If you prefer you can connect the printer via an USB cable and the printer will be automatically installed.



I spent hours trying to figure this all out on my iMac I installed the contents of the CD tried to upgrade the drivers from the Apple and the Canon websites. Once I understood what needed to be done it took only minutes to install the drivers on my two MacBook's. Save yourself some headache and keep your Mac clean of bloated junkware by installing only the drivers you need. These will allow you to control all the printer's functions (duplex paper size and type alignment head cleaning ink levels etc.) and even your spouse and kids will be able to use them.



Why can not these instructions be found on Canon's support pages? Why is their installation procedure so messy? Trust me it's not a Mac problem their Windows soluition is equally complicated. Will the situation be better once their printers ship with OS X 10.6 compatible drivers? I think the core problem is that they are not listening to their customers. If they did you'd see a reply from a Canon official under my review. Don't look it won't be there...



This printer supports direct iPhone printing if you install the free "Canon Easy-Photoprint" app from the Apple App Store. You will be able to print to 4x6" photo paper right from your iPhone when both devices are connected to the same WiFi network.



I recommend this printer it does a nice job once it's set up. Do not hesitate to buy it if you are on Snow Leopard. But call Canon's support line and tell them they should not overcomplicate the printer installation process.



Update 1: If you have any kind of trouble with the printer or the installation call Canon Support at 1-800-828-4040 they are very good with Mac's and willing to spend the time figuring out problems. My iMac could not detect the printer through WiFi no matter what I tried while my MacBook's could print flawlessly. Canon support figured out that Parallels was interfering with the network settings even when not running. I doubted it but Parallels support confirmed it. I had to remove Parallels install the printer and re-instal Parallels. All works now.



Update 2: For occasional single page scanning jobs Snow Leopard's built-in Image Capture is sufficient. If you want to catalog your scans convert them to multi-page PDF's use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to create editable text files from of your scans you should download and install Canon's "MP Navigator EX 3.0". The name is not very catchy but he interface is nice the functions are not too hard to learn and the program does well what it's supposed to do. It's a decent scanning utility go for it if you don't mind the 80 MB installation footprint.



Update 3: Thank you everyone for your kind words in the comments! I am not an educator just a frustrated customer who wanted to save others from the trouble I went through. I'm very pleased that this review helped so many fellow Mac users with installing a nice multifunction printer. Thank you Amazon for the opportunity! If any of you purchases this printer and finds that a Snow Leopard compatible installation disk is included please let us know I will update the review.More detail ...