Region change on ip4500

[Raydoc]

I finally found an F-tray to buy and now I need to change the region on my printer. All of the webpages I can find talking about how to set a US ip4500 to print CD-ROMS are now gone. I know I have to do something to the setup as well as removing or modifying some cover piece.

Does anyone know what I have to do?

 

[PeterBJ]

In short you need to remove a piece of plastic blocking the CD tray entry slot, change the region of the printer to one that allows CD printing like Europe, uninstall the driver, install a driver from Canon UK plus some CD printing software.

The removal of the blocking plastic is found here, by using the "Wayback Machine". It is for an ip4300 even if the link from the archived "Damn printer page" was for iP4500. This doesn't matter, iP4300 and iP4500 are very similar mechanically.

The ip4300 and iP4500 support both the old "CD label print" program and the CD label print function in the Easy Photo print EX program. Some find the Canon CD print programs too basic and prefer a 3rd party program like Acoustica CD label maker.

For the region change you need to perform some operations in service mode, you find the procedure in the service manual which is found here. But beware, there is an error in the service manual, please read this warning before attempting service mode operations. I suggest you first try printing the service test print and EEPROM info print from service mode before attempting the region change.

If you are unsure about service mode operations, please ask before doing something wrong. An error made in service mode can cause problems.

A side effect of changing the region to Europe is that the default standard paper format is changed to A4 instead of Letter. But changing the region to Canada might be an option, as CD printing seems to be supported for Canada and I think Canada uses the same paper formats as the US. See the service manual page 16 and 17.

After having changed the region, but before having deleted your present US driver, you could try running the aomwin110ea23 add on program from Canon that adds CD print functionality to the driver. It works with the drivers provided by Microsoft update when doing a plug and play install with a Windows version newer than XP. This add-on is no longer found on the Canon websites, but here is a download.

You also need a CD print program. Canon Easy photo print can be found from the Canon UK website, but CD label print is no longer offered for download by Canon, but here is a download.

Both downloads were clean according to AVG Internet Security and the number of bits were identical to previous downloads from official Canon websites. This was checked using Total Commander.