I don’t know if it’s the hardware or the software or both, but this printer/scanner has been fairly irritating with Snow Leopard.

I’m quite disappointed, because I’ve had a lot of Canon printers and they have always been great. This one is great in many respects, but the networking works really badly for us.

Problems we have:

• Sometimes when we try to print it works fine and sometimes OS X reports a “communication error”. Sometimes pausing and resuming the printer seems to get things working. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes rebooting the printer and/or the computer does the trick. Even when this “communication error” occurs, I can still ping the printer, which tends to refute my earlier theory that the problem was the wireless network. This leads me to think the wireless network is working fine and something wonky is happening with the printer and/or the drivers.
• Sometimes when I’m having problem like the above, I press the button to turn the printer off and it churns away doing its “power off dance of lights” for several minutes until I lose patience and pull the power cord. This really seems like a fairly serious hardware problem.
• Sometimes when attempting to scan from the panel of the printer, it shows the computer as a destination; sometimes it does not. Rebooting the printer and/or the router sometimes seems to help.
• Sometimes when attempting to scan from the panel of the printer and it actually shows the computer as a destination, it just doesn’t work. I select the computer as the destination, the printer thinks for a while, and then it asks again for a destination.
• The MP Navigator EX software is fairly annoying and un-Mac-like.
• As far as I can tell when you scan from the panel of the printer and send it to a computer, the filename always defaults to “IMG.jpg” or “IMG.pdf”. Renaming the file is pretty easy, but it’s somewhat tedious to look at the document to see what it is, because when you double-click it, rather than opening up in Preview.app, it opens a small MP Navigator EX window and it’s tedious to navigate in.
• It seems that if you use Finder to manually rename files that are in the MP Navigator EX directories, MP Navigator EX gets very confused, so you have to do the renaming in MP Navigator EX.
• When you look at the Canon support site to download drivers, it is incredibly confusing, because you pick OS X as the platform but not a particular version of OS X and you don’t pick your language. So you look at a long list of a lot of different confusing software packages for various versions of OS X and with English and Spanish mixed together. For some reason, there seems to be an almost ridiculous number of software packages and I’m still not really clear on which ones are needed for what — e.g.: the scanner driver, the ICA driver, the CUPS driver, the MP driver, Solution Menu, IJ Network Tool, Wireless Setup Assistant, IJ Setup Repair Tool, MP Navigator EX, and MP Navigator EX Opener.
• A few minutes ago I tried to print something and the printer queue window has been stuck saying “Copying print data…” for several minutes now.

Is it just me or does this printer not work particularly reliably with Snow Leopard?