This is a pretty mysterious thing to me. It seems to work out of the box for HP printers that are network connected which is amazing. The net is that you can’t get an i9900 to work with a print server or off your Windows machines. It only works if connected to a Mac or to Apple Airport. Or you can get a Pro9000 or newer Canon printer that does work.
However, if you want a Canon i9900 to work with all your Macs, then you pretty much have to get an Airport Express/Extreme or hopefully the new Time Capsule. That is because of the need to support something called CUPS printing. Wow, I have lots to learn…
Apple – Support – Discussions – Canon i9900 printer no good on print server …
Network printing/Windows printing only works with a driver that was meant for network printing. To use the OS X built-in CUPS network choices, you need a CUPS driver. For postscript printers, this is not an issue, because postscript is the native output of OS X, and can easily be routed to the various choices in Printer Setup.
Non-postscript printers are Very Different. Except for Brother, no manufacturer has provided CUPS drivers. Instead, what you get are Carbon-type, OS9 legacy drivers, that have the comm protocol written into the driver (mostly USB). They can only print via local connection.An Exception is that when printing via an Airport/Bonjour enabled print server (Airport Express/Extreme/another Mac), where the software does a port redirection, USB output from the Mac gets routed to the USB port on Airport Express/Extreme. In other words, a USB-only driver will work for network printing through Airport Extreme/Express and for Mac-to-Mac sharing.
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