This is a quick guide for those of you wanting to print wirelessly to a Canon Pixma MP460 (or other model) from your Mac. If you are reading this, you have tried and you are probably getting frustrated.

First of all, this is a Mac issue due to the Mac driver provided by Canon for the printer. On a PC running Windows, this is not an issue and if you are using a PC, just use the Canon printer driver provided and change your printer connection from USB to your print server using IP printing or any other port installer provided by your wireless print server.

In response to people looking to print to a Canon Pixma MP460 (or other similar models) from Mac OS X through a wireless print server, it requires some extra steps. The problem is that Canon’s drivers for Mac OS X (at least for this printer) will not work or even be available unless the printer is directly connected to a Mac via USB.

First, you need to be able to see your print server when adding a new printer. You can use IP printing, or Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous), but I will not go into an explanation of that here. Chances are that you already know how to do that and have become stuck when choosing the printer type and model. Read on for a solution…

In order to print to this printer using a wireless print server/router, you need to use a driver that is compatible with the printer and that is available without the printer connected via USB. However, the default gimp-print drivers provided with OS X for Canon do not usually include drivers that will work for the MP460.

What you need is a driver for a Canon Pixma MP180 (not provided by Canon). Until an MP460 driver is made available that works, this is the next best thing.

If you do not already see a driver for a Canon Pixma MP180 on your Mac, go to http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net which is the home of Gutenprint (formerly gimp-print) drivers. Dowload and install the latest stable relase and after upgrading your Mac’s printer drivers, you should be able to see some new Canon models, including a Pixma MP180 which will be roughly compatible with the MP460.

Hopefully, Gutenprint will soon release a new upgrade of their drivers with full support for the MP460, or maybe Canon will release revised drivers that can be used with any type of printer connection, and not just USB. Until then, you can at least print wirelessly with these instructions. Thanks to everyone at Gutenprint for their great work in releasing so many high quality printer drivers for use in Mac OS X and Linux.

UPDATE April 30, 2008: After using the MP180 driver as explained above for a few months with a Hawking print server connected to my MP460 (printing using a wireless MacBook), I can report that it works well and I have not noticed a single problem - and print quality has been good.

UPDATE May 20, 2008: In some cases, using Windows XP with the Canon print driver (supplied by Canon) with the port settings changed from USB to your network print server settings, and with that printer set as your default printer - can cause all sorts of problems with certain applications that will refuse to load properly. These can include Photoshop, Illustrator, Painter, Dreamweaver, GoLive, Quark Xpress, and others. This may not affect everyone and again, I am only referring to systems running Windows XP and not Mac OS X. The solution is just to make another printer the “default” printer in Windows.

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