Few notes about using Canon LBP CAPT laser printers in Linux / *nix

LBP means "laser beam printer" and CAPT does "Canon advanced printing technology".

CAPT devices are some kind of "Windows GDI [Graphics Device Interface] printers". All the RIP [Raster Image Processing] for these printers is done by the driver installed on the host computer, which allows the printer itself to stay relatively "dumb" and inexpensive. They use some proprietary / undocumented protocols called SCoA ("smart compression architecture") and HiSCoA ("high" version, probably) for data compression and communication.

The official Linux CAPT drivers are closed-source with some open-source parts. They support mainly RPM-based (like RHEL, Fedora and openSUSE) and DEB-based (like Debian and Ubuntu) Linux distributions.
CUPS carries out the standard PostScript print processing work, the rest is done by the CAPT driver part itself (and it has some bugs and limitations).
Some instructions about configuring the CAPT printers in Ubuntu can be found here:

• CanonCaptDrv190 - Community Help Wiki
• HardwareSupportComponentsPrinters/CanonPrinters - Community Help Wiki

Note. It's quite interesting that LBP-810 is unofficially supported by the LBP-1120 driver.

AFAIK, currently the most up-to-date version of official Linux CAPT driver is 2.71 (May 2017).

1. Canon South & Southeast Asia ("Issue Number : 0100459601");
2. Canon Australia support website ("Issue Number : 0100459602");
3. Canon Europe support website (it's called "Download: 0100459604", but unfortunately I can't find a more specific generic direct link; please try to search using your printer model).

(Sometimes, some regional sites can have some delays in version release, so it's better to check multiple download links above).

Also, some projects do exist in attempt to develop alternative, free & open source Linux / *NIX drivers with some help of reverse engineering.

1. Canon LBP-810 / LBP-1120 CAPT Linux driver (inactive; there's also a Canon LBP-660 / LBP-460 Linux driver there).
2. Unofficial LBP-3010 CAPT3 Solaris driver at SourceForge (another inactive project).
3. captdriver is a project somewhat inspired by the preceding ones; initially was aimed at LBP-2900, support planned for LBP-810 / LBP-1120 and newer printers like LBP-3000 etc.
   1. GitHub - agalakhov/captdriver: Driver for Canon CAPT printers
   2. GitHub - agalakhov/anticapt: CAPT reverse engineer scratch repo
   3. foo2capt [old versions at SourceForge]
   4. Canon LBP-2900 и другие CAPT-принтеры - ПИШУ ДРАЙВЕР [a discussion in Russian on the LINUX.ORG.RU forum]

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Last updated: 2017-07-15