Cheryl on the Web

I’ve crossed a new frontier in terms of things it is hip to do in the 21st century. What might I have done, you wonder? (and, even more interesting perhaps, what is on my list of things hip to do in the 21st century?) Well, it wasn’t video chatting on a mobile phone (I don’t even have one); it wasn’t the purchase of a new 8-megapixel camera (though that would be nice); and it wasn’t online game play (even though that’s out there and I could in theory if I wanted). No, after having purchased a new Canon printer almost a year ago, I finally managed to print some digital photos this week! But the road was long and full of setbacks…

When I bought my Mac laptop last year, I could get a Canon Pixma 4200 printer at a discount with it via a rebate program. The Canon printer supported color and photo printing. So I thought, why not? The printer we had at the time was a standard B&W printer, around 5 years old, and always printed the pages out in backwards-order. Of course, little did I know at the time that I would yearn for the days of the old printer once I had the new one…

Eventually, the new Canon Pixma printer was delivered. Since I use a laptop, the printer isn’t plugged into my (mobile) computer but into Tim’s (stationary) desktop computer - and the first surprise I got when trying to connect to the new printer is that Canon doesn’t support network printing for Macs! Unbelievable. So every time I wanted to print anything, Tim and I had to swap the cable for the printer back and forth, with my laptop resting on Tim’s desk. And to add insult to injury, I bought this silly printer via Apple!

I spent the next 6 months relentlessly looking for a way to get my Mac to print to the printer over the network, and by then I was so disgruntled I really wanted to beat the printer to scrap metal in a field, like the scene of the fax machine beating in the movie Office Space. I eventually found some third party software called PrintFab, that - according to the forums - was my only hope. I paid 50 euro ($65) for this software. At this stage, the network printing with PrintFab was hit or miss - I would have to restart my computer or the printer or both repeatedly before sometimes and with great effort, my document would print. The great feature of most of the print-outs was that they were about 30% smaller than they should have been, so a website page became almost impossible to read. But hey, at least I was printing at all on my big waste-of-money Canon Pixma printer.

Then, at about this time, Canon refused to give me the rebate I should have gotten for buying the printer. They claimed I didn’t mail the original UPC barcode with my letter (which of course I did).

When we moved houses, it got worse: the printer needed to sit in the home office, which is 25 meter from Tim’s computer, so Tim definitely needed to print to it via the network. And the network router can’t sit in the office since the DSL hookup is in the hallway. So I spent another couple months trying to find out who makes a print server compatible with both a Mac and Windows, that works wirelessly (the router is in the hallway, printer server must go in the office with the printer), and that supports this Canon printer that is completely useless to begin with! There is good news here: I ordered the D-Link DP G310 wireless print server - and it works with both my Mac and with Tim’s PC, wirelessly over the router!

And, after some more research and trial-and-error, I got the PrintFab software working on my Mac reliably, so now I can print without any problem to my terrible Canon printer over the wireless print server! Tuh-duh.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I managed to finally get to the point where I printed off digital photos on my very own printer. It’s kind of like jumping into the deep end of the swimming pool - at first the concept is scary because it sounds complicated, and why would you want to anyway? But in the end it’s great being able to print off our own photos - we now have a photo-door on a cupboard in the livingroom where we post all the new ones we’ve taken.