Printer has "copies" of itself when selecting which printer to use

[KiwiBird]

I have two questions:

1) What is the difference between the regular printer and the printer with XPS? WHich one should I be printing from?

2) Why does it show two versions of each printer? Sometimes it says I can't even print from the regular one but have to use the one with (copy) in its name, why is that?

Also I don't know why I have so many printers on here...I only had three seperate printers I tired hooking up but it says I have 10?

[jrhoffman75 · Accepted solution]

Sometimes if you reinstall the driver the system creates a second version of the device.

If you go into Device Manager you can see if the driver versions are different for the two printer instances.

You can ignore or delete the extra copy. It only comes into play if you select it when you go to print.

The XPS version is supposedly a 16-bit printing pipeline. There seem to be an unlimited number of discussions on line about 16-bit printing in Windows. 

If you use Canon Print Studio Pro it will use the XPS driver. I have compared both the standard and XPS driver and haven't seen a difference, but I also haven't seen any problems, so I use the XPS version when printing from Lightroom. I don't use PSP.

[KiwiBird]

Oh thats odd because I don't think I tried installing it twice. And it seems I can only print from the ones labeld (copy 1) so maybe I'll remove the first ones. If I have issues with it I can always try to reinstall the whole thing. The drivers say they are the same so not sure why there is 2 of each.

Also when I go under "device manager" I don't see an option for "printers," just "printer queue" but I guess I can still access the same info you were trying to show me.

[jrhoffman75]

That's strange. I guess if its working I wouldn't worry.

The other option would be to uninstall both copies and do a clean install.

Do you see a driver listed in Programs & Features?

First the regular driver and then the XPS driver.