Great little device

I just bought one of these because I was having problems printing using a USB cable. My Canon ip6600D worked fantastically well with my DELL laptop running XP. I recently turned that in for a DELL Desktop running VISTA and the troubles began. The printer would stop mid photo and spit out the have done print. Other times when I booted my PC I would get an error message that the device was unrecognized or offline.

Neither DELL not Canon were of much help. I bought a Canon Scanner and was getting the same errors about unrecognized or offline device and this time Canon told me "you have to use the USB cable we provided, the three foot long one, you can not use a 10 foot long USB cable even though we claim to be USB compliant". Setting my scanner on top of the PC and using the incredibly short cable worked.

This gave me an idea so I tried a short cable with my ip6600D and viola, it worked great. That left a problem. I can't pile all my peripherals on top of the CPU with three foot long cables.

So, I bought the BU-20 and gave it a try. It took 2 minutes to install, if that. All I had to do was turn on the printer and then plug the BU-20 into the blue tooth port on the lower right front of the printer. The PC immediately recognized it and I was done with installation. One hint, the BU-20 does not come with installation instructions or a user guide. That information is located in your printer user guide. There is a section on bluetooth operation.

I have full functionality (ink status, printer status, etc) and it seems to work as well as a short cable but with the printer 12 feet away from the CPU. My only complaint is that the transmission speed is much slower than a cable. Seems to take about 2-3 times as long to print as it did with the cable.

I am still puzzled as to why I ran into these cable limits which were not a problem before. Either VISTA or my DELL Desktop are hyper sensitive to USB cable length for some reason. My laptop was running this printer over a 15 foot cable which is supposedly the USB maximum. It is a bit of a scam that these manufacturers can claim to be USB compliant yet not support the maximum cable length specifications.