Scan through USB connected printer on Print Server

Question

I have two printers, a Lexmark laser printer, and a Canon colour printer/scanner. They are both hooked up via USB to my Print Server. They are set up in Print Management and shared as \\PS1\Lexmark and \\PS1\Canon.

When the client computers use the Canon printer via print server, they are not seeing the scanning functionality of the printer. When they connect to Canon via Wi-Fi IP (sidestepping the print server), they can use the scan functions.

From what I can tell both methods are using the same driver but I can't figure out why one seems to be limited in functionality.

Solution

Scanning functionality is capable when you directly interface with the printers, but when you share out the printers on a Windows server like you've done you have a "middle man" that is handling the print queues and sending the actual jobs to the printer. However, they are print drivers, not added functionality like scanning options, and even if the server had the 3rd party scanning software installed and functioning locally it still wouldn't "receive" a scan job from a client like this with just a shared printer queue.

As such, it really is only good for printing itself...not for scanning functionality.

If you need scanning functionality from the client workstations to the printer, then you'll need to setup a direct connection to them, at least for the scanning portion...either through whatever scanning program you are utilizing, or Canon's own software, etc.

Comments

[DTI-Matt]

Could you please expand on this? From what I can surmise it's the driver that Windows is assigning to the deployed printers that is preventing the Scan function, not any port issue. I would need to allow Inbound connections of Port 5100 for scanning is what you're saying?