Scan and Print

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I have the following configuration:
PC: Pentium 90 mHz.
Scanner: Canon N640P (parallel)
Printer: HP Deskjet 500 (linked through scanner)

After switching the PC on printing a document works well.
When I print a document after scanning a document, the only thing the printer produces is a lot of characters on a lot of sheets of paper, but none making any sense.
From now on printing only produces rubbish.
Switching of the PC allows to do it all over again.

Scanning seems to make printing impossible.

Any suggestions how to solve this?

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I have two suggestions:

1- Don’t connect the printer through the scanner. You might consider buying parallel port card to put into your PC and connect the printer or the scanner to that. If you have a USB port on the PC, you might also consider connecting the printer to that (depending on what OS you are running). If your printer does not support USB, there are cables that go from a PC USB to a printer parallel port. Unfortunately, HP printers don’t seem to do well using those cables.

2- Check to see if you have the latest drivers for the scanner. If not, try installing those. If you do have the latest drivers, call Cannon technical support and ask them how to fix the problem.

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Legare,

Thanks for the reply,
Yes, I have the laters drivers, yes I called tech support, they suggested playing around with the LPT1 settings in the BIOS, I was already past that point, the printer either didn’t do anything at all or just the same rubbish after scanning.

Tried the USB to parallel cable, did not work with a HP 500.

I was also thinking of a second parallel port.
But I still think the linking throught the scanner must work in some way.
I remember putting something in the autoexec.bat file a couple of years ago, but I cannot remember what exactly (it worked, that’s what I do remember!)…

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Bart,

I’ve tried the print through ports on a number of devices, Backpack CD-ROM, Imation SuperDisk and something else which compeletly escapes my memory!

I never did get any of the HP 540, 670 or 690 printers in the company to work.

My solution? …You want more toys you do without colour printing.

I will watch developments with interest as I may have a use for any solution you find.

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I switched it off (it didn’t print, I predicted that in advance), I switched it on.
Result: the same rubbish, as far as I can see the only thing the printer receives are bad characters!

The only thing that seems to work is scanning, logout, switch computer off, switch computer on, print.
Once a new scan is made, printing something understandable is impossible!

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Hi Bart,

Just a thought. From reading your posts I assume it was the HP Support site you’ve tried, did you try querying the Canon site? They just might have a solution/work-around.

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Hi Granville,

I tried the HP support desk and the Canon support desk.
They couldn’t give me the proper solution (except for installing an extra parallel port, but I thought of that one myself).
Just for the fun of learning how things work I still want to know why the printer acts that way after making a scan (or in other words: what did I do wrong?).

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You are not doing anything wrong. Those devices that allow you to connect two things to the same printer port do not work very well, particularly when the two device are from two different companies. What is happening is that some of the commands that are sent to the parallel port are allowed to go to both devices. Something that is getting through to the printer is putting it into command or binary data mode, and when data meant for the printer arrives it is being misinterpreted. My experience is that if the two devices don’t work together, you are never going to get them to work together, and each of the vendors is going to blame the other.

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