Canon MF4150 and Airport Extreme

A good friend of mine recently bought the Canon MF4150 (on my recommendation) for his home office. He needed to replace his ageing laser printer and wanted a AIO laser with faxing support, preferably from the Mac. According to the specs, the MF4150 did all this, so he purchased the unit and rang me when he couldn't get it working on his AEBS.

The MF4150 uses Canon's proprietary pdl called UFR2. Having used this driver with the imageRUNNER MFD's, I knew it was a driver that worked via TCP/IP and AppleTalk. So I thought it would work fine with his wireless network. But I was wrong!

After connecting the MF4150 to the AEBS USB port, the PSU was opened and Add selected. The MF4150 was displayed as a Bonjour device in the Default Browser view, but when the MF4150 was selected, the Print Using menu couldn't find the correct driver. If you browsed to the Canon folder, no UFR drivers were available, only the Canon BJs and GIMP/Gutenprint drivers.

Now, according to the manual, the correct procedure to add an iR via UFR is to select More Printers > Canon IP (UFR2). Then you input the IP address and leave the queue name blank. The driver then queries the printer and selects the appropriate 'ppd'. So, hoping that the USB port is somehow mapped to the AEBS's IP address (which according to Apple tech info (107998) it is possible for XP to print to the USB port by using IP) I was hoping the same could be done for OS X. But unfortunately it didn't work; the spooler stops as soon as the job is sent. The cups log shows the following...

I [26/Jul/2007:13:27:52 +1000] Job 195 queued on '192 168_11' by 'wazza'.
I [26/Jul/2007:13:27:52 +1000] Started filter /System/Library/Printers/Libraries/PrintJobMgr/Contents/MacOS/PrintJobMgr (PID 373) for job 1.
E [26/Jul/2007:13:27:52 +1000] [Job 1] fatal: The printer is not supported, or the printer information is not acquired correctly. If the printer is supported, delete the printer from the printer list then add it again.: 10322
E [26/Jul/2007:13:27:52 +1000] PID 373 stopped with status 82!

The error was generated because it is not possible to manually select the UFR2 driver, and the driver fails to find the printer on the AEBS USB, so it defaults to a Generic device, which the printer does not support. If the printer supported PS, or even PCL, then we may have been able to use a compatible driver, such as one of the Gutenprint drivers. But alas, the MF4150 only supports UFR2, and it only has a USB port, so it seems that there is no way that this model can be connected to wirelessly from OS X 😟

So let this be a warning to anyone looking at the Canon MF4150 and who wants to use the device on their wireless OS X network. It works fine via the Mac USB (and Windows via wireless) but cannot be installed via the AEBS USB (AFAIK)...