IRC3200 ImagePASS-C1 and IRC3220 ImagePASS-C2 Vista 64-bit postscript drivers

Thinking of making the upgrade to Vista 64-bit in the next couple months for greater than 4 GB of RAM support and wondering about print drivers for my Fiery Imagepass RIPS; is anyone here printing to their Canon Color Imagerunner 3200 with Imagepass C1 RIP or Canon Color Imagerunner 3220 with ImagePASS C2 RIP under the Vista 64-bit OS? Are 64-bit Imagepass postscript drivers available, and have you had any problems?

 

The 64-bit Vista certified PCL driver was released on 5/23 (listed at both http://www.usa.canon.com/html/download/imagepass-c1.html and http://www.usa.canon.com/html/download/imagepass-c2.html), but you'll have to wait a while longer for the Fiery Vista PS driver - I don't know of a published ETA for this.

 

Is there any chance at all the current Windows XP-32-bit ImagePass Fiery postscript drivers would work on Vista 64-bit as they are?

I know some of the NT/2000 drivers for example worked fine on XP when it first came out, while others did not... or is it an absolute no go because of either 32/64 bit or because Vista 64-bit requires driver signing with no option to install anyway?

 

I may have misadvised you and have some bad news for you if you're looking at using your EFI Fiery driven irc3200 or irc3220 with a highend graphics workstation:

On 5-2-2007 canon released a document which gave a roadmap for fiery controller ps support:

32-bit vista was scheduled for Q3 2007 but 64-bit vista fiery postscript driver support for both the imagepass c1 and impagepass c2 was listed as "no plan" "These Products will not support [64-bit] Windows Vista"

I'm also disappointed Canon and EFI would drop the ball and not support the the Fiery postscript RIPs.

 

A bit of a late followup, but Yani on the CorelDraw forum shared a neat trick. I didn't even think to try, but it turns out you can get somewhere by:
1.) using the 64-bit postscript driver from another fiery rip printer in conjunction with
2.) the ppd for the canon in question which you can get from the package supplied for mac driver

In my case, I actually installed the 64-bit driver for a xerox Fiery EXP250 PS and the ppd for the irc3220.

I haven't been able to get a 100% match to the color output from the 32-bit canon driver for the imagepass c2 (color output options are slightly different), but for non critical work, it's close and so far I haven't seen any output glitches as I was expecting.

At least it works and in some ways the output is noticeably better to my eye than the 64-bit canon-supplied pcl5e driver (since there is no 64-bit canon-supplied ps driver for these older rips.)

Next I'll try the older irc3200 and imagepass c1 and see if the same works.

 

Hi Jeff,

I am so frustrated with Canon. I have an Image Runner 3220 with a C1 fiery. Running 64 bit Win 7 and need badly a PS driver.... any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Neil

 

Likewise, the Fiery RIP is so expensive for the actual hardware that I was/am definitely frustrated too that canon/EFI didn't release a 64-bit fully-featured driver. I had hoped that they would at least supply new drivers during the lease period which for me was 5-years on both machines.

I'm actually still running a 3200 + C1 and just finished printing 1,000 envelopes on it today using the makeshift solution in my post above. It doesn't give you a nice looking interface, and it's not quite the same as "the real thing" but it works surprisingly well for me.

 

Another thing you can do is to run a 32-bit windows pc xp mode virtual machine under windows 7 with the 32-bit windows xp driver that is available for the fiery c1, but I found that a bit slow and cumbersome to switch back and forth to print.

 

We also have the IRC 3220 with C1 Fiery Rip, and we are also having trouble with the drivers to work with Windows 7, any help much appreciated.