What is the real story behind Canon Printers & Printing CD's

[Trigger 37]

I've been wondering for a long time what the problem is with Canon Printers and Printing CD's. We all know it can be done. Many of us have converted (or restored) the abilty of our Canon Printers to print Beautiful CD's. Earlier this year I finally found a guy that had a good supply of the "C" tray for my Canon ip6600D, so I shelled out the bucks and got the Tray and the simple instructions. I had everything updated in less than 30 minutes and printed my first CD on the iP6600. Because this printer has such high pixel count the CD is almost identiacl to the original. I had used my high resolution Canon scanner to make an image of the original CD and then used Microsoft Office Picture Manager to enhance the image so the printing would look the best. The software that came with the CD tray is very simple but very very accurate. The modification I had to make to the iP6600 was so simple I could not believe it,...and updating the driver was even easier. The other strange thing is how easy it is to change the country code in the printers eeprom from USA to Europe. A piece of cake. The Canon iP6600 does a fantastic job of printing these CD's, and it is a marvle to watch, and wow is it fast.

Anyway, back to what I wanted to ask other on this forum. I don't know how long ago but it seems that just about every printer that Canon has put out since it started the iSeries with the i550, i560 printers, has had the ability built into it to print on CD's. This is no small thing. It is probably the most complex thing that a standard printer can do. It has to pull the CD tray in from the front, scan the surface to see what kind of printable surface is there, then register the CD to the correct position, and then print it. In doing this it has to adjust the printhead and carriage height to something that is far different than any kind of document that it will ever print.

So all of this function has been built into these printers but probably less than 1% of people in the USA know about this, and probably less than 0.1 percent of them have done anything about it. How did this get started. Why is it that USA Epson printers can print on CD's. It must be some kind of Patent problem and Epson has never let Canon have license in the USA. CANON does ship their printer to ASIA, Europe, and all other countries with this feature enabled,... but not in the USA. But Canon has continued to make each and every printer ready to print CD's, but have gone to the trouble to disable all units shipped to the USA. It is not disabled very much,... all it takes to bring it back to life is to change one single digit code in the EEPROM. Then, all you have to do is "Uninstall the Print driver", and then reinstall it again once you've changed the eeprom code. The driver is already set to work and it works the first time,... no problem.

Canon Ships the CD trays with each printer outside of the USA, but they will not sell you one even if you know the part number. I guess that Epson really has them locked up. I wonder how many years they are going to continue this joke. You would thing the guys in the front office would get smart and try and sit down again with Epson,.. and make a deal. Would anybody want to make a guess how many Canon printers are in the USA. How many people would be printing their own CD's and DVD label if this feature were available in the USA. How many more Printable CD's or DVD's would be sold.

If I were the MFG. of CD's and DVD's like Verbatum, or TDK, or Maxwell, I would package up all the stuff needed, including the tray, and sell it in Sam's or Costco, for what ever it cost,... and watch my sales go up and up and up. Gosh, do you wonder how much more ink Canon and other people would sell if this was available.

If I didn't already have 97 other things to do I go into business and do it myself.

 

[on30trainman]

Trigger,
Yes it is all related to a patent problem - Canon is not allowed to enable the CD print function in the USA. I was involved almost from the beginning with the CD printing thread in the Steve's Digicam inkjet printer forum. Some very smart/ingenious people were able to work out the relatively easy fix to enable CD printing, but it took about a year. It took getting hold of the service manuals to determine the button pushes needed to change the EPROM data. Several of us even built trays to hold the CD for printing - this was before a supply of trays from Europe was made available. My first real Canon tray was from a fellow in GA (he got his trays from Europe) whom I had helped get his printer enabled - I was very appreciative of his generosity. Then I actually ordered and received two more trays directly from Canon USA - for a short time they were selling them, not realizing that they were not allowed to. That source quickly dried up. Wish I would have also ordered the roller assembly - that would have made the CD/DVD loading into the printer easier. Sometimes I need to give the tray a gentle push to get it loaded. My Canon ip4000 does a bang up job printing CD/DVDs. There are several sources on the Internet for custom designed DVD covers/labels.

Steve W.

 

[Trigger 37]

On30trainman, Well at least I finally know for sure. I always knew it was some kind of patent issue, otherwise Canon would have done it years ago. How long will this continue. Is it just that they totally hate each other, or is it that Epson will never let go of this. The patent issue will expire after a total of 7 years.

What amazes me is the functionality that Canon continues to put into each of their new printers. For example, you talk about rollers for the CD trays. My iP6600D has them built in and the tray mode is recognized automatically every time I pull down the tray door. The software that I got for free, called CD Label Print, works perfect and centers the disk image to the exact spot where is should be on the CD tray. Has not made a bad Disk yet.

I made a couple of errors in my note above. I don't know exactly how far back this CD functionality goes, but I don't think it was ever put into the i550. I am pretty sure it can be enabled on the i560. The way I first noticed the capability was when I used the Service Manual and printed the Service test pattern. At the bottom of that pattern it prints "CD Sensor OK",... which kind of tells you that it is check CD positions. Also, the manual tells you that it has settings for the X & Y offset for CD location. This data is stored in the EEprom information where they keep track of everything. It also has the Country code that has to be changed from USA to Europe. What I really liked was that the software driver for the iP6600D was already enabled. Once it detected that the printer was set for Europe, it loaded the correct version of the driver to support CD printing. I'm just amazed on how smooth everything works together to get this done.

I print a lot of CD's and DVD Movies. I make DVD movies from my Digital Camcorder using VideoStudio ver 9. It is just so much nicer to have a high quality phot on the CD's and DVD's rather than a pasted label.

I just wish that Canon could make a deal with Epson and really start to take advantage of this feature.

 

[on30trainman]

Trigger,
Your post and my response brought back memories of the struggle many of us went through back in late 2004 (I got involved in Dec 2004) and 2005 to get CD/DVD printing to work on the USA Canon printers. This morning I went back to the Steve's forums and reviewed some of the past posts. It appears that the problem is actually with Phillips, who holds the patents, and the fact that Canon didn't/doesn't want to pay the royalties/fees to Phillips to allow CD/DVD printing in the USA. I assume that the latest series of Canon printers still don't have that feature enabled. My Canon printers are the older ip4000 and ip6000D. The ip4000 is enabled - haven't bothered yet to enable the ip6000D.

Steve W.