Canon i-SENSYS LBP5100 Colour Laser Printer

Printer delivered yesterday. No driver included for Mac OS X. 24 hours later I still cannot get it to run reliably (barely at all) using the driver downloaded for Mac OS X from the Canon site.

The very few pages I have coaxed out of it, indicate that this unit can produce great results. Very, very frustrating. I haven't had to mess around like this, with no progress, on a computer for ages. I thought those days had gone. If I crack this problem (or indeed, send the unit back) I will report.

UPDATE: Ok - I've sorted out how to avoid/or sort dodgy operation of this machine when using the Mac driver and get good, reasonably fast results. However the CAPT StatusMonitor for Mac remains totally useless- it refuses to have any dialogue with the printer at all, so consumables-levels, print-count and job queue remain completely unavailable (although the last item is available through the Mac dialogue panel). Freezes and printer disconnection / restarts are still necessary too often for comfort.

Canon support have been utterly useless.

To be completely fair I have (reluctantly) run the printer from a Windows XP laptop, and the difference is instant. Everything runs as it should, although the driver control dialogues are the usual Windows, complicated mess.

Clearly the real problem is with the poorly written Mac OS X (10.4.11) driver, which in time might get fixed by Canon - but I'm not holding my breath and still considering sending this quite nice little printer back for a refund.

FINAL UPDATE: I know this a review site and not a tech forum - but I do feel the need to be fair. Canon finally came through with useful support, even if the process was long, hard work. My LBP5100 is now working perfectly down to an additional factor in the driver installation process not covered by the Canon installation guide. By using 2 Mac machines to test it, I've found that deleting all other Canon printers, trashing the Canon folder from 'Library' then using 'Reset Printing System' in 'Printer Setup Utility' is essential, prior to a reboot and then driver installation, to allow the driver and utilities to load properly.

The printer and utilities now work very well indeed and I like this printer a lot.

My own experiences setting this printer up on two Macs have been good, no problems:- one running 10.5, the other 10.4. The procedure is slightly different for both OS's, but Canon provide clear instructions for each version of Mac OSX. The other point I'd like to make about this printer is how quiet it is, especially compared to a Konica Minolta 2430 DL which was my previous colour laser printer.