Canon CN-600

There were some notebooks with printers built-in, Epson made one in 1990s with dot matrix printer. Canon is another big printer manufacturer and they also sold a notebook with printer. This unit has printer in detachable dock, it's a small ink-jet printer with black cartridge. Cartridge (Type BJI-101) can be filled with ordinary ink as for BC-02 cartridges.
The notebook, sometimes sold as Canon Compri CN-600, has powerful Pentium MMX 166MHz processor and expandable RAM. 2GB hard disk was sufficient for most applications. 800x600 TFT LCD screen was good for graphics/multimedia applications. CN-600 was a very good notebook for design and multimedia, printer made it ideal for document processing. It was possible to attach nice quality speakers indock's battery pack bay.

Canon was not good at notebooks manufacturing, so this unit is in fact only marked as Canon. The same notebook was sold as Texas Instruments Extensa 900 line. The only difference is in some connectors making TI's power supply unit not compatible with Canon notebook. The dock is Canon's work based on Extensa's "Mobile Productivity Base". It has its own expansion option but no expansions were developed for it.


Manufacturer Canon

Origin Japan
Year of unit 1997/8??
Year of introduction ??1996??
Type Laptop, PC
CPU Intel Pentium MMX, 166MHz
RAM 72MB (16MB OnBoard)
Floppy Disk Internal 3.5", 1.44MB
Hard Disk 2GB IDE 2.5"
Other media CD-ROM in dock module.
Graphics and display: 800x600 SVGA TFT LCD
Sound: PC Speaker, SoundBlaster-compatible card, detachable speakers.
Keyboard and pointing device: Small PC keyboard with numerical part on letter keys

Touchpad with 2 buttons.

OS: Windows 95 (If you have >32MB RAM I recommend Win98)

 

Power supply (notebook):

1 - GND
2 - +20V DC 1,5A

Power supply (dock):

1 - GND
2 - +20V 2.7A

I/O:  - Serial port
 - Parallel port
 - VGA 15-pin video out
 - PS/2
 - Sound I/O jacks
 - Dock connector
 - 2x PCMCIA

 - Network Card (RJ45) in dock module

 
 
 
 
 
 
Possible upgrades: Dock, battery, speakers, memory (RAM SO-DIMM).
Additional peripherals:   - Additional battery
 - Speakers block
 - CD-ROMs with drivers
 - Manual
 - Power supply for printer/dock unit.

 

There are two CR2032 batteries in a system, one in the notebook, one in a dock. Battery in docking station is just under a small cover easily removable by user. To replace notebook's RTC battery you have to remove main battery unit from notebook, then remove clips holding it in place. You'll see two screws, remove them. If you need you can remove upper screws shown by removing main battery. Now you should be able to carefully pry open the left part of notebook, where battery is hidden in left battery clip part.

Printer can be installed as Canon MBJ-20DK, it works quite well with cartridge re-filled with typical Canon ink, such as used in BC-02 cartridge. To print, slide front paper tray first, place one sheet of paper there, it should not go entirely. Printer will take this sheet by itself and printout will be pushed to the rear of notebook.
To dock a laptop, you must: Slide docking cover off in a laptop, remove dust cover in a dock, place laptop like in a hinges using hooks on the right of the dock, then place it on docking connector. It's not docked yet. Now open and close docking lever finally locking notebook in place. To undock do the same thing reversely: Open docking lever, lift the laptop towards right, close lever, cover connectors.

This notebook was supplied with 2 CDs full of videos how to use it in Windows 95 environment. This multimedia guide was made using ActiveX, VBScript and other strange technologies embedded in simple HTML files few bytes each.
If you have such a CD, remember that in newer versions of Internet Explorer (for example 5.5) it may not work as expected. Do not even try to launch it in Opera or Mozilla browsers as it won't work without launching VBS code. There are some binary blobs in VBS files which make system for example open specific control panel windows/tabs for user. These pieces of executable binary code launched from HTML documents (sometimes called blobs) have been considered as security breaches and turned off in later versions of Internet Explorer. Video files should be playable in a modern system.

My unit is from Germany as it has German keyboard layout. It had small problems with touchpad and it still has them as chip is fixed, but damaged ribbon cable is not and it tends to disconnect in random few-second periods. The unit is in quite good condition and was probably used with care. It's complete, even dock's connector dust cover is not missing, so it was probably not frequently undocked.


Photos from multimedia CD.

 

Extensa 900 Technical Documentation
Extensa 900 electrical diagrams
CN-600 Notebook manual [GERMAN]
CN-600 Dock manual [GERMAN]
Dock/printer drivers
Win95 CN-600 drivers
Win95 MBPro tools
File transfer tool supplied on CD Part1 Part2
SoundBlaster 16 drivers:  Part1, Part2, Part3