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From: Christopher Hunter on 24 Jul 2007 01:44
Andrew Ed wrote:

> Having worked for Canon in the UK for 17 years before going self employed
> I have to say that they aren't a bunch of miserable clueless fools,

That's /entirely/ /contrary/ to my experience. I was treated with rudeness
and arrogance by everyone I ever talked to at Canon. They used to make two
products that I really liked, but after-sales support and service was
non-existent.

> however, as a corporation they do not support Unix and Linux very well.

I was told "what's that?" and "No! You /have/ to use Windows!".

> When they were new out the sales department went to sell an IR6000
> complete with folder finisher and all the kit fitted in to a purely Linux
> environment,
> Head office in the UK said NO, sorry we don't support it.

That's what all Linux / Unix enquiries are met with.

> As a corporation they do not see the critical mass
> required to believe it worth the investment of finances.

The Dell /corporation/ were met with the same sort of arrogant indifference
when they enquired about buying and reselling Canon products. It's very
probably cost Canon tens of millions.

> When they do they will produce the software needed. It is their loss as
> they are already behind the competition.

They probably won't ever bother, and the "critical mass" will prove to be a
huge rolling boulder that will crush them!

> We only use Epson or HP peripherals ourselves and even if the software was
> available I wouldn't change because the output quality of prints or scans
> are no better and the Canon units are more expensive, they aren't even
> better built or more reliable.

There you go! "We only use Epson or HP" - what a telling phrase. Many
others also /don't/ use Canon products for all the same reasons /I/ don't!
The reliability of Canon products is generally inferior to those made by HP
and about the same as Epson.

> In the UK the Canon printers cost more for
> the inks than the Epsons although friends in Canada and the USA say it is
> different over there. As well as software drivers I would recommend
> producing some running cost comparison tables for locally available
> consumables.

Consumables are an appalling price for /any/ brand of printer, and the
manufacturers can't understand why sales of their print cartridges are
falling. If they cut their prices to realistic values (slightly less than
10% of their current prices), they'd kill the competition stone dead
overnight!

> An Epson CX3650 I picked up from Ebay worked straight out the box on
> Mandriva for printing and scanning (Scanning across a network from a
> Windows PC using Xsane for Windows even works) it replaced a Canon
> multipass that only worked on Windows 9.x and nothing else.

I briefly had a Canon Multipass MP390. It simply wouldn't work properly,
even with Turboprint drivers, and I got rid of it as soon as possible. The
HP all-in-one that replaced it worked immediately when I downloaded and
installed the driver from their website.

C.

From: Andrew Ed on 24 Jul 2007 03:33

"Christopher Hunter" <chrisehunter(a)NOSPAMblueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
news:6lgpi.8709$%v3.6561(a)fe3.news.blueyonder.co.uk...
> Andrew Ed wrote:
>
>> Having worked for Canon in the UK for 17 years before going self employed
>> I have to say that they aren't a bunch of miserable clueless fools,
>
> That's /entirely/ /contrary/ to my experience. I was treated with
> rudeness
> and arrogance by everyone I ever talked to at Canon. They used to make
> two
> products that I really liked, but after-sales support and service was
> non-existent.

Chris

For my luck I had easy access to the technical support group as it was at
the time. The 'Support desk'
for customers was something completely different. Some members of TSG were
extemely helpful, others were not. On the whole the help desk knew far less
about issues with products than I did at the time. As
the support desk is still undermanned I don't expect them to be dabbling
with Linux any time soon when they still don't support it and they are over
busy supporting Windows and Mac users. In other words until their corporate
outlook changes they will continue to 'stuff' themselves and their
customers. Ultimately they will lose customers.

I use Epson peripherals nowadays because of the fact they work out the box
on Windows,Linux and Mac. They are cheaper to run, give as good if not
better results and are reliable. Even when I worked for them I refilled my
own cartridges on my BJ20 right back to when I had an Amiga, because it was
still cheaper than staff purchases and the inks were better.

Unless enough people complain to any company to the right place then it will
never be noticed that anyone is trying to use their products on Linux, their
customer help desk neither has the time or inclination to do so. It is
their loss as a corporation but history is full of companies that rise and
fall in to oblivion.
Incidentally even when they they provided drivers for Amigas many years ago
the drivers were written for them by an outside source in Gemany. Buying
their products and then getting rid of it still keeps their production lines
running - short term. Either don't buy their products or buy them and nag
to the right part of the company, or thirdly write your own driver or get
someone to do it for you. An old customer wrote his own driver for a GP215
SCSI scanner to use in DOS because he was p****d off at their lack of
support but he liked the rest of the kit and what it could do.

If it doesn't work in Linux I don't buy it to start with is how I vote with
my wallet, however, if no one bought the kit to start with there would NEVER
be any driver written - they don't write themselves! so people like myself
could be considered to be leaching off other peoples previous issues. Or
just be considered more cautious and doing research before buying
peripherals. I recently bought a stack of Edimax Wireless cards because a
native driver is available in Linux, not just Mandriva but as source for any
distribution. It took a simple Google search to find the information
needed.

An end user trying to switch from Windows to Linux has the choice of
changing hardware, hoping it is included in the distro or sourcing it from
elsewhere. With only a few exceptions hardware doesn't come with a CD and
manual that says for Linux use this.

As for Canon they are unlikely to do so until they believe the Linux desktop
market is at least as large as the Mac market, their OSX drivers are very
hit and miss across their range, even on their EFI/Fiery based products
(Some of which use Linux as their base OS), other products still use Canon's
own Printer Control language when the rest of the planet uses PCL or PS who
else uses CAPSOL? or use the Windows printing system as per some of their
smaller laser printers. They will get a wake up call or lose out, however,
that is not a decision to be made in the UK it has to come from Japan and is
likely to be driven by the USA.

Andrew Ed


From: Christopher Hunter on 24 Jul 2007 17:20
Andrew Ed wrote:

> They will get a wake up call or lose out,
> however, that is not a decision to be made in the UK it has to come from
> Japan and is likely to be driven by the USA.

You're entirely right. The Americans will probably outlaw Linux sooner or
later (there aren't any deliberate backdoors in Linux, unlike Windows) so
the "powers that be" can't easily examine the contents of Linux users' hard
drives. Canon and other companies of their ilk probably won't ever get
'round to writing Linux drivers!

C.
From: Adam on 24 Jul 2007 18:24

Needless to say, that its just such an issue that triggered the founding of
FSF and GNU in the first place.

http://www.april.org/articles/intro/gnu.html.en

and elsewhere.


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