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According to some posts in Canon's forum, the PIXMA MP560 printer/scanner isn't supported on Mac OS Catalina. But it hasn't been officially supported since 10.11, and it still works on 10.14.6.

Anyone have experience trying it on Catalina? Does it work with Apple's built-in drivers?

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There's been a lot of question regarding these Canon Pixma MFPs of late. The driver was probably a 32 bit driver which is why it worked up to 10.14.x (Mojave). Typically, printer drivers will work with newer versions of an OS if the print system hasn't changed significantly.

From a Windows side of things, we had Windows XP printer drivers in Windows 7/8 machines without issue. Likewise, we had Windows 7 drivers that worked flawlessly in Windows 10. And here on the Mac side of things, there are lots of discontinued printers that has compatible drivers (I have an HP CP2025dn that works flawlessly).

Unfortunately, these consumer based MFPs can be difficult to support. On the OpenPrinting site this particular printer is listed as a "Paperweight." This means that there's not even a generic driver that you can get that will support it.

However, what you can do is if you can get it working on an older Mac or a Raspberry Pi running Linux where it is supported, you can share it over the network and print to that print server and let it render the job instead of connecting directly.

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  • Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. Although, from a link on that post, I found that VueScan includes a reverse-engineered driver for the scanner at least.
    – JW.
    Commented Oct 26, 2020 at 15:40
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    VueScan does have updated scanner drivers - this is probably because the scanner was at least TWAIN compliant. If it was just WIP (Windows) only, it would be less likely. The problem with these Pixma printers is that the engine is "host based" meaning the job is rendered on the computer, not the printer. That becomes really difficult to support after it's been discontinued.
    – Allan
    Commented Oct 26, 2020 at 15:42

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