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Tutorial on Canon Drivers Website
While Canon may be best known for their cameras, their product line is actually much more diverse than one might expect. While they produce a wide array of office supplies and products for use in industrial applications, the devices that concern us are geared toward the home electronics consumer. In this realm they offer everything from digital projectors to color printers, scanners and fax machines. Their official website has a driver page which will provide you with all of the software that you'll need to get any of these products interfacing correctly with your personal computer.
Type "www.canon.com" into your website address entry bar within the web browser that you are using and you will be taken to their worldwide home page. Since their products are sold around the globe, they give the user the option of choosing their geographical region. Choose yours to go to your specific market; the example I will be using from here on out is the US version, but for all intents and purposes the layout is the same for each one. On the main regional page, just beneath the Canon logo at the very top of the page is a red toolbar used for navigating around the website. Look for a button labeled "Support" and place your mouse over it. A drop down menu will appear, allowing you to choose the category of hardware the device you need drivers for belongs to. Most likely your selection will be "Consumer," although if your issue is Windows Vista specific, you may want to pay a visit to that page for potentially relevant and helpful information and/or driver downloads.
After clicking "Consumer" you will be presented with a page labeled "Support" at the top. Its main feature will be a series of three drop down menus which must be interacted with sequentially. The first drop down menu will allow you to pick which category the device drivers you're going to be downloading belong to. Choose cameras, printers, or whichever category suits your request; this information will be used to determine the next set of choices that you will have. The following menu will ask you to clarify which type of device you possess in that category, further narrowing down your results. Finally you will be asked to choose which specific model you are dealing with from what is usually quite a long list. Once you've found it, click the small silver "GO" button just beneath the last drop down menu to submit your information.
You will arrive at the final page you need to access, and here be presented with a large amount of relevant information and downloads to your model. You will see a picture of your hardware, and below it find its name and a series of horizontal gray tabs with labels such as "Overview," "Features," and "Specifications." One of these tabs will wear the label "Drivers & Downloads." Click this tab and the information contained within the frame below the tabs will change. You will be prompted by another drop down menu to choose on which operating system the drivers are to be installed. Windows and Mac OS drivers are commonly available. The frame will change again and display all of the downloads available for that model and configuration. Locate the appropriate file, right click on its link, and choose "Save Target As..." Place the file in an easy to find folder, navigate to it, and double click on the file. It is a self-extracting standalone installation executable and requires no outside software to open. Follow the on screen prompts that appear and your drivers will be installed successfully.
