Canon Microfilm Scanner 400

[RWAP]

This is another interesting project.

A customer has been using the Canon Microfilm Scanner 400 to date, with a Canon FilePrint 400 printer. Unfortunately, as with many old printers, this one keeps running into problems requiring maintenance and restarting the printing.

There are two main problems here - the lack of technical information on both pieces of equipment is the biggest stumbling block. We have raised a support ticket with Canon, but they have not (yet) been able to find anything on their systems.

a) What is the printer connector? It is a female 25 pin D socket, so we can hope that it is a parallel port (or possibly even a serial port).
b) What printer languages are used?

As with many projects, the first step has to be the customer acquiring a retro-printer so that we can see if the port is a parallel port, allowing us to capture data. We then look at the raw data to determine if it is a known printer emulation (eg Epson, HP PCL, or Printronix). If not, then we have to write a new emulator based on best guesses for the printer code.

We have become fairly adept at simulating an unknown printer code, as has been shown by the Siemens PT-88 emulator, Seiko STP emulator and the more rececent EPSON ESC/Page LP-S300 emulation. Unfortunately, some of the codes give no clue, and even out best guess-work prevent us from understanding the meaning of the code; which is a great shame. Without the older reference manuals, we have to rely on comparison of raw data from different print runs / sources.

Fingers crossed this Canon will not be too much of a challenge!