Canon PIXMA MX350, Short Review and Notes on TCP/IP Network Ports
2011-02-05 Updated
2010-11-03 Initial Post
I set up my new Canon PIXMA MX350 today. So far, I really like it overall. But two things that I don't like are: 1) It's HUGE compared to my old HP Officejet 5610 All-In-One, and 2) It has a vertical paper tray in the back. I won't go into more detail because the main purpose of this post is to note some information about the network part of the device.
The device uses TCP/IP ports registered with the name Canon BJNP Port n with n being a number 1 - 4. I haven't put a network sniffer on to see exactly how it uses each port, but it looks like some ports might be used specifically for printing, faxing, or scanning. Per http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers, these are the four registered Canon BJNP Port ports:
canon-bjnp1 8611/tcp Canon BJNP Port 1
canon-bjnp1 8611/udp Canon BJNP Port 1
# Atsushi Nakamura <nakamura.atsushi318&canon.co.jp> November 2003
canon-bjnp2 8612/tcp Canon BJNP Port 2
canon-bjnp2 8612/udp Canon BJNP Port 2
# Atsushi Nakamura <nakamura.atsushi318&canon.co.jp> November 2003
canon-bjnp3 8613/tcp Canon BJNP Port 3
canon-bjnp3 8613/udp Canon BJNP Port 3
# Atsushi Nakamura <nakamura.atsushi318&canon.co.jp> November 2003
canon-bjnp4 8614/tcp Canon BJNP Port 4
canon-bjnp4 8614/udp Canon BJNP Port 4
# Atsushi Nakamura <nakamura.atsushi318&canon.co.jp> November 2003
Note these aren't the same ports for setting up a standard TCP/IP printer because these ports are specific to Canon devices. I don't know if other companies license this technology from Canon also.
As far as I can tell, you cannot print to the device over the network without installing Canon's drivers. The driver adds two printer ports, CNBJNP_<12 character NIC MAC address> and CNBJNPFAX_<12 character NIC MAC address>. Since I set up mine for WiFi, these ports have the MAC address of the WiFi NIC. My Windows 7 and XP computers both have these ports.
During the printer driver install/setup, I'm hypothesizing that the local subnet is scanned and for each active node, a connection attempt is made to one or more of the aforementioned ports. So if you had two Canon network printers setup on the same subnet, the setup program would detect and list both.
I'm not going to waste time testing, but I don't think that the setup searches beyond the local subnet, so I think the device and computers must both be on the same subnet. I did search through the MX350 Network Setup Troubleshooting guide and didn't see anything about subnets. One way around this would be to share the printer from a computer on the same subnet.
It looks like all the current Canon consumer all-in-one devices have the same network behavior. The posting here has some interesting information about the PIXMA MX700: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=571795&page=.
Duplex Scanning
2011-02-05
I was trying to figure out how to scan both sides of a document. It turns out that to use duplex scanning, I have to install another Canon program named MP Navigator EX. To figure that out required me to install the MX350 series On-screen Manual so that I could find out how to scan in duplex mode. The regular driver install does install a scanner driver named ScanGear, and it works fine, but doesn't have the duplex option. MP Navigator EX doesn't have a good user interface and it took me a few tries to get it to do duplex scanning and save to PDF format. The duplex scanning is manual--you scan one side and then rotate the documents 180 degrees to scan the other side--not the cleanest method, but it works.
