Inkjet printing requires orders of magnitude more engineering expertise, materials science, industry experience and financial resources than most people imagine. That is the reason, open inkjet printers don't exist despite having been consumer products with the same drawbacks for more than forty years.
That is why this is a pre-crowdfund landing page without a demonstrating a working prototype. I would like to be wrong, but I expect you to be waiting a long time.
An inkjet printer is not a collection of off the shelf parts. It is a machine that operates at the edge of chemistry, fluid dynamics, and electro-mechanical design...you have to place tiny tiny drops of liquid ink on commodity wood pulp with precision under arbitrary environmental conditions, get that ink to dry on the wood pulp, but not in tank or nozzel, while producing acceptable color, durability, and ease of use.
Also lawyers...there are patents.
I noticed that previous post is from a couple of months ago, and it looks like about a week ago they posted a project update and they claim for their current prototype: "We are successfully printing in both black and full color." https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer/updates/...
Of course I have no way of verifying either way. Still I do think the project looks quite interesting, I'm in the market for a printer and this is certainly the most interesting one I've seen in a while.
On the technology side, I'm somewhat hopeful because it looks like they're using off-the-shelf HP ink cartridges for this. HP cartridges embed the printhead into the cartridge itself, and that printhead is arguably the most complicated part of the entire device. Outsource the printhead, and you're just designing a plotter with a PCL interface.
I agree that the bigger challenge is going to be patents.
It also wouldn't surprise me to see HP add DRM to cartridges to authenticate the printer itself if this catches on. (Possibly requiring a printer driver/firmware update.)
Impression v. Lexmark is directly relevant to the patent situation here; in a case involving reprogrammed ink cartridges, the Supreme Court held that patent rights are exhausted by first sale doctrine; that is, if you sell me something patented, you can't sue me for patent infringement for using the thing you sold me, even if I do something later that makes you upset.
It's also been widely held that ink cartridge compatibility tools/hacks are allowed under DMCA.
However, it does seem likely that there's probably some shenanigan involved in the area - one example I could think of would be if HP have patented the way the ink cartridges are retained in the printer, for example, that would have to be carefully audited. And there will be license and trade secrets issues with the use of the cartridges, although if they were reverse engineered cleanly and the printer doesn't come with cartridges, those are probably pretty easily side-stepped.
These cartridges were first released in 2004, and there don't seem to have been any major design changes since then. The electrical and digital interface for printing has remained the same, as well as the mechanics. There is a new DRM system using another chip, but that is one-way - ie. It prevents an original printer from using the cartridge, but doesn't prevent use of an original cartridge by a third party printer.
Any patents are probably expired or very close to it.
A sea of patents designed to inhibit competition & promote rent extraction, and we are running around in circles chasing our tails wondering how we can compete with China.
China is changing stance on patents... Thier companies are now filing for patents at great speed, and I wouldn't be surprised if they start mass suing American companies for violations.
I could totally imagine a rapid upheaval of the patent system as soon as we see it being used against us.
The cartridge heads have a super curious digital protocol - the cartridge electronics have no power supply. There is no power rail internally either.
Instead they use the fact mosfet gates have capacitance, and can therefore store 1 'bit' of information. Through a network of hundreds of MOSFETs, the right bits can be put on all the nozzle gates as needed, and then a 'fire' pulse is sent which for around a microsecond turns on a tiny heater (or not, depending on mosfet gate state). The heater boils some ink, making a pressure wave which travels down a pipe and makes a drop of ink fly out towards the paper. That heating and cooling again can happen around 10,000 times per second per nozzle (and there are ~300 nozzles).
I suspect this decision is because the custom silicon process needed to manufacture these nozzles is cheaper if they only have n type MOSFETs - and without p type MOSFETs you can't make a typical push pull logic gate.
The nozzles themselves are quite a lot of silicon - perhaps 100mm^2, with deep etched holes, and are effectively disposable, so I assume huge efforts have been taken to reduce costs - including this curious electrical design.
The protocol also is hugely irregular, which I suspect might be to avoid any wires on the chip needing to cross eachother.
> I agree that the bigger challenge is going to be patents.
Surely most/all of the patents around the actual inkjet printing function have expired though, right? I had inkjet printers in the mid 00s and if anything I feel like your average inkjet is worse these days.
In medicine, it's a regular trick to find some new patentable formulation or tweak to switch to manufacturing shortly before the original patents expire, so that you continue to have a patent-protected product.
It would not surprise me if something similar was happening here: HP's current cartridges have at least one piece that is under active patent protection and they don't manufacture any designs that have no patent protection. I don't know enough to state that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Maybe they should have purchased a design from Canon or someone that isn't really in this market anymore. It seems like not only are they locked into a specific older technology generation (which could be ok idk) but they also risk HP just discontinuing that cartridge. It seems like the printers for this cartridge were released around late 2017 so they could deprecate earlier than they normally do. Seems like they provide 10-20 years typically. At the same time , maybe this is just meant for a small user base of nerds and maybe HP wont care.
Canon is still in the market, they just supply parts and license IP to the printer manufacturers like HP. They make some high value stuff to sell to the OEMs but I don’t think they can make a whole print head anymore.
Why would they bother? They make all their money on the ink cartridges. If this drives more cartridge sales it’s a win/win for them. They generally don’t make much, if anything, on consumer ink jet printers themselves
It’s negligible revenue and carries some risk. Say the printer works well, and these enthusiasts drive a couple of thousand more cartridge sales. And that encourages someone to develop an alternative cartridge, which is mechanically and electrically compatible with HP’s.
It just seems easier to fire off a cease and desist than to take a risk of other people messing around with your ecosystem.
The crowdsource page says it has refillable ink tanks rather than cartridges. Unless they are modifying HP cartridges, which is probably not smart from a legal standpoint.
I don’t see why HP would want to do that. They have huge margins on ink, right? I’m sure the increase in cartridge sales would offset lost subscription revenue from useless cloud services, if only because the people who are gonna use an open source printer would never pay for that anyway.
Yea, but then the print head clogs up after the second time you refill it and you buy another expensive print head + ink from HP.
Frankly, I think 99% of the reason they started integrating the print head with the cartridge was to avoid all the problems you so frequently see on printers that don’t use disposable heads.
The single hardest part is the print head. If you can reuse an existing one, and you can, then you're most of the way there.
The paper path itself is mechanically involved, but not to an impossible degree - it's hard to make it work, but it's not MEMS magic, it's manufacturable in the same way advanced 3D printers are manufacturable.
The fact the campaign is run on crowdsupply makes me a lot more hopeful it'll get to market vs a site like kickstarter. Crowdsupply requires a working prototype before launching and they provide all the expertise to actually get projects to market, off the top of my head I don't believe any crowdsupply project has failed to deliver.
Compatible cartridges
HP 63 and HP 63 XL (US)
HP 302 and HP 302 XL (Europe)
HP 803 and HP 803 XL (Asia)
So they just use HP inkjet technology. That makes it less open-source, but even "open source" parts are going to be under non-commercial license (CC BY-NC-SA) anyway.
Is there a Linux server run on fully open source hardware (what would that mean btw?)? Should we stop using "open source" because almost all computers are not fully open source?
Quite a lot of open source hardware is licensed under the BY-SA Creative Commons license which is an actual open source license. E.g. the Arduinos and things like the Milkymist One which can actually run linux.
99% of this is the printhead and the ink formulation. Assuming you use generic off the shelf solutions for those two components you’re set. All the printer companies do their lock in at the firmware and software layer.
Yeah, I found that original comment to be a bit nonsensical. It would be like arguing you can't build your own PC because the lithography tech needed to make modern ICs is really complicated. I wasn't planning a laying out my own chip, and these guys aren't planning on building their own printhead from scratch.
yes, I was about to build another gaming PC, and then I remembered the ASML machine costs 20 bajillion. Will wait for the ASML machine to come down in price, to around couple of grand.
There's also the long term strategy where if they can sell enough printers, they may at some point in the future do get the budget needed to make their own print head. It's not like printers were invented in 2026.
At the 2400 DPI that an HP printer can handle, the printer needs to place the head at 1/100 mm precision three times for every single dot on the page, and not smear them, despite not knowing what thickness or weight or finish the paper has. That is not trivial.
I have enormous respect for dot matrix printers. They're easy to repair and service, the tech is relatively simple, it's cheap, it's parts are cheap, its supplies are cheap. It's way more sustainable than any other printer: both the printer itself in its manufacturing and the ribbons themselves. The waste they produce is also much less polluting than any other printer.
They also kind of suck. I'm not one for "the latest and greatest", but their output quality is atrocious compared to modern printers, they're loud AF, and I'm guessing it may have existed but I never saw a dot matrix that didn't have the perforated edge for feeding.
There was no reason to sell a dot matrix printer that wasn't compatible with tractor feed. Especially when some of the biggest uses of those printers required that stock. Doesn't mean they required tractor feed paper to operate.
A Matrix printer is essentially a typewriter with extra steps and typewriters had been eating any paper for .. a century before?
Dot Matrix are still used in outdoor / high humidity environments in USA.
A lot of car shops with regular 100% humidity conditions will swear by dot matrix + tractor for feeding paper + printing. Plus, the carbon copy forms are guaranteed to be exact carbon copies which also leads to legal guarantees about copies of paper being provably exactly the same in the court of law.
Pen plotters could accept sheets of A4 and very precisely position them since at least the 80s. I'm surprised that dot-matrix printers didn't adopt similar technologies sooner, though it could be because by the mid-80s dot-matrix printers were the budget option, fanfold paper with the tractor strips was still abundant, and it was much easier to just stick with the cheaply manufacturable technologies rather than take the risk of innovation with a product that wouldn't sell upmarket anyway.
Were A4 plotters that much of a thing? I'd thought plotters were usually larger format (A0-A2 sort of size) for engineering drawings etc. Also iirc they were insanely expensive compared with your standard microcomputer dot-matrix printer.
I certainly don't have deep knowledge in this area but my understanding is that the cartridge is basically a cavity with a small hole at the bottom and a piezo electric element at the top to sputter liquid down. The tolerances are tight but considering how advanced manufacturing is, I would imagine someone competent could design and prototype it with the tools and manufacturing ecosystem that's available now.
There's at least one project that has tried to design an actual DIY/open-source inkjet printer [0], along with inkjet print heads [1].
The ink most likely need some special sauce? But I imagine there's many organizations that can specialize in making the ink so that it can be treated close to a commodity. If not, maybe this can also be engineered?
This printer uses HP 502 cartridges. Readily available, but don't expect to save on ink costs compared to a regular HP printer.
They do claim that this printer will print in black when the colour cartridge is empty, which they imply is not possible with common printers. The only time I ever encountered that I simply removed the colour cartridge and the printer was happy to print in black.
Except when you need to ocassionally print/copy in color, in which case inkjets are more economical.
Even if you can afford a color laser, the problem is a color MFP (ie including a scanner) occupies a lot more space compared to a equivalent inkjet, and for some people this could be a deal breaker.
I have all Brother printers too, they seem to be the only brand that's not actively trying to screw their customers. My B&W laser at home is on its second drum and still soldiering on, we got an A4 colour laser multifunction for work which does double sided document scanning and printing and it was... I think $380 or something, five years ago. Would buy again. I don't really need colour but it's nice.
I'd have to buy a printer tho. The one I have has done its job for a decade and I think I've bought a grand total of one offbrand toner cartridge in that time.
Extremely little? High quality inkjets may make sense for corporate or industrial uses, but the majority of home/consumer use cases probably print very infrequently these days. In that scenario inkjet is pretty bad because the ink dries out between uses - there is a reason it's such a common trope that inkjets never work right when you need them.
I switched to laser because I only print like maybe once a month on average (but when I need it, I need it). I'm not the slightest bit worried about the delta energy usage between my laser printer or the inkjet, and I'm sure the inkjet came out worse given the number of cartridges I had to throw away or paper I wasted printing diagnostics.
None, in the months (sometimes years) it spends switched off (off, not standby) between print jobs. It's a quarter of a century old and I can still get replacement cartridges when I need them.
Generic inkjet cartridges (including the nozzles) and ink are readily available. The head movement and is easier then a 3d printer, the will be some learning's for the paper handling but seems very achievable to me.
Lol then 3D printing must be space technology that only the most advanced materials labs in the world can achieve, yeah inkjet is not simple, but it’s also not magic,
The issue is mainly the nozzle. Ironically 3D printers are a lot easier there, since you just need to melt a thick wire, and not worry about microscopically small droplets.
Which is why its more surprising this was first announced last year and there's no Proof of Concept demo yet?
But really, I've given up on ink jet printers, and have gone the cheap B&W laser route for anything I need to print at home (In the past year, 2 times, a backup ticket and some paperwork that needed a real signature sent back).
But when I had them, the thing that went bad 99.999% of the time was the cartridges or a clogged nozzle on the head. So the advantage here, on the repairability side not DRM, is the rails and motors?
Also that cutter is going to be a pain, having worked on Lightjet printers, that cutter was nearly all field service issues until the FEs started leaving the "laser" key so lab managers could reset the blade themselves.
An open source all-in-one-printer would be a great device to have. For eg I would love to have the scanner include a camera. So I can get “instant scans” most of the time, and a higher res scan when needed. Maybe the camera could also notice when the person making copies or scans forgot their original and ping them?
You'd probably need some basic custom lens (not crazy $$) that would distort the heck out of the image, but you could correct the shape in software. Given that GP wanted this to be the "low quality / high speed" secondary scanning option, the inevitable loss of quality would be acceptable.
Seeing chromatic aberration on a document scan would be strange, but this is basically how many document scans are created today (using phone camera + software correction). It's just the lens effects from this cheap lens would be a lot worse than what Apple/Samsung/Google can do with their super expensive to design custom lens stacks.
Color laser printers (MFPs with ADFs to be exact) aren't exactly cheap. Last I checked they were 2-3x more expensive than equivalent inkjets, and occupied a lot of space too.
Try to find an typical consumer inkjet printer on AliExpress, you won't find any, or if you do, it will be someone reselling the usual brands like HP or Canon. You will find label printers, industrial printers, 3D printers, thermal printers, and all sorts of weird stuff, but none of them able to put ink on a stack of A4 paper.
If the Chinese, who are known for being able to make knockoffs of everything are not able to make inkjet printers, this should tell you how hard it is.
It addition to the print head, reliable paper transport is also really hard. That problem is often sidestepped by using a paper roll or by printing one sheet at a time, as it is the case for the Openprinter.
A more likely explanation has to do with the economics of ink jet printers. The ink sales are so profitable that HP and other manufacturers subsidize their printers. This leads to prices at or near cost.
Since Ali express vendors can't count on follow on ink sales, they can't compete on price. And competing on price is Ali express's reason for existence.
So, ink jet printer are harder to find on Ali express. At least, low end consumer focused ink jet printers.
Laser printers, which aren't subsidized are common
Several Chinese companies have their own domestic laser printers, claiming of in-house components and development (Cumtenn, ZoneWin), and one company does inkjet printers in addition to lasers (Deli Printer).
ZoneWin, a laser printer company, made a clone of both HP LaserJet 1020 and LaserJet M1005, which reuse most of the original/compatible parts (Q2612A cartridge). They claim it's 100% domestic parts only.
I think the top-ranking comment about complexity is off base: they're not inventing inkjet printing from scratch. It's basically a bunch of existing modules in a new package, presumably with the promise that you will not need to buy subscriptions or DRMed ink cartridges.
Is robustness and reparability a compelling pitch? If I'm counting right, I owned eight different printers in my life. Dot matrix, dye sublimation, inkjet, laser. I don't think a single one ever required any serious repairs beyond replacing consumables, clearing paper jams, and pulling out lint. I upgraded as the technology improved. My first laser printer needed about 4x as much desk space as the current one.
> I don't think a single one ever required any serious repairs beyond replacing consumables
I think your experience has been an outlier. I've had several printers from different brands also, and have had some that last a long time, and still print with decent quality even with off-brand ink/toner. However, quite a lot have also failed due to bad capacitors, bad power modules, or the printer or it's firmware just refused to work/print for whatever reason and the manufacturer response was: "buy a new one." There's definitely planned obsolescence built into these machines, and that's why people dislike them, aside from the fact they can be a pain to configure. That's in addition to the ink DRM and other shitty cartel like bs from printer manufacturers.
I owned a Brother inkjet for some time. I'd print maybe a few times a year. But it seemed like every time I needed to print, the printer was out of ink. Granted I used an ink service (ie not official brother ink) but still where the heck was the ink going?
I've since switched to a Brother LaserJet and I'm still on the starter toner after a couple of years.
An inkjet printer has to be used at least monthly if not more often. If you left it plugged in, the printer was likely squirting ink in to a waste tank to prevent the nozzles from drying out and ruining the printer.
Laser toner can sit unused without drying out (it's dry powder already).
I would highly recommend getting a laser, especially if she isn't doing a huge amount of printing. You can leave them forever without printing and they'll just spin up and work in an instant. Both B+W and color ones are really decently priced these days.
If she wants to print words or shapes on paper, then a laser printer is perfect. If non-photographic color is also useful, then a color laser printer is fine. They're happy with heavy usage, and ~zero usage, and everything in between. Brother is the answer here; they tend to be low-bullshit.
If she wants to print color photographs regularly and absolutely doesn't want to wait for them, then: Some manner of inkjet. Brother inkjets take care of themselves (as long as they're powered up) with a ~daily automated song-and-dance to help avoid the head-clogging issue that many other inkjets face, but even then it's a more fickle technology than laser printing is.
It's also important to compare the price/convenience of printing photos at home to having someone else do it. Buying high-quality prints (whether from online services that deliver by mail or from the local pharmacy or big box) can be cheaper and better quality than doing it at home, and make maintaining the printing machine someone else's problem.
(edit- I unintentionally left it to implication, but: If she wants to print color photographs only once or twice per year, then... she's probably way, way better off by not doing that at home. At all.)
I never had problems with Brother for laser and Canon for inkjet. The models I have are no longer being manufactured, so I can't recommend anything specific. I did my best to stay way from HP for inkjet, they always had bad rep.
> Is robustness and reparability a compelling pitch? If I'm counting right, I owned eight different printers in my life.
Like the other commenter mentioned, I think your experience is likely an outlier. But more to the point, the way printer companies make money (lose money on the printer, make it up on ink), the couple times my printer has broken, I just bought a brand new printer. I'm sure the printer probably could have been easily fixed but it wasn't even like that was a decent option.
This printer probably isn't for everyone but there are enough of us who are so fed up with "subscription fatigue" and locked down devices that having a tool that I fully own and could fix if necessary is appealing.
I don't get why this isn't an ink tank printer. Yes, those HP cartridges are technically refillable, but the printheads tend to clog up after a few refills, and then you are stuck paying retail for another cartridge.
It would be a lot more aspirational to figure out how to build a tank-based printer (although maybe its not possible to compete with the incumbents on price in this space)
> With Openprinter, you are free to choose between standard sheets or a roll of versatile paper.
A few other comments have concentrated on the printer head and ink cartridge, but the roll vs sheets interests me. Manipulating sheets of paper is actually quite a difficult problem to solve - and there is only a demonstration of paper placement. Loading page after page is actually really not easy at all. There is no example of it printing.
I see they got a nomination for a design award [1], which in my personal experience has been a negative signal for successful projects. On the same page they mention that they also mention that they don't even know how much this will cost yet:
> We know this is your most frequently asked question! Final pricing depends on a moving puzzle of production volumes, BoM costs, industrialization expenses, regulatory certifications, and final engineering developments.
On the crowd funding page it mentions for parts [2]:
> Main board: Raspberry Pi Zero W
> Cartridge board: STM32 MCU
Not a specific MCU variant, and the specifics of the Pi variant (i.e. RAM) are not mentioned. I would expect these parts would be locked in by now. I have a feeling that this is not quite as ready as made out - I think there is still R&D going on.
This is interesting, but it seems to be a crowdfunding campaign only. I wish them the best of luck (the cause is worthy for sure), but buyer beware at this point.
(I myself don't 2D print enough that an ink based printer makes sense for me. Ink tends to dry, so for me a laser printer that can sit for months at a time makes more sense. I use the scanner as well as my 3D printer far more often.)
I wonder how they will handle the nonsense around yellow tracking dots[1] etc. Hopefully that doesn't become a problem.
National security letters or old boys network or maybe just fat bribes to the right engineer. Could be a requirement for government procurement too, so not a law, just the requirement of a huge customer with deep pockets and negative price sensitivity.
Counterfeiting was a big worry as high-resolution color printers became cheap. They did it motu proprio just like today ~all AI gen services watermark their outputs.
Unfortunately they mainly use Discord and Instagram. They post updates on Instagram regularly but are quite active on Discord and often ask for community feedback there and post updates there as well. I've been closely following them for a few months
The printer surveillance is my main draw to this project. EFF basically came to the conclusion that all Western printers likely have some sort of surveillance like that. I've confirmed with them on the Discord that they are not required to implement any such surveillance
yeah, I have a cheap brother laser printer, I don't print that much, but it's been solid for several years. I did have an HP, but it was incredibly problematic, would jam rather easily. Works fine under linux as well.
Does the ink ever dry? That’s my biggest problem with non-lasers - I print maybe 10-100 pages a year but every time I need to change the toner because it’s too dry. And do you print color or no?
Unless I'm missing something using this in a commercial application would be a license violation:
> Open Printer is distributed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
> This means that everyone is free to use, share, and modify the project, provided they credit the original author, share derivatives under the same license, and do not use it for commercial purposes.
It's also not opensource yet, there's a vague mention of "when its ready" it'll be released.
What about that license makes you think you can't use the device (i.e. print things) for commercial purposes?
The license applies to the thing, not the thing you print using the thing. Me writing software or prose on a computer running Linux using a GPL editor wouldn't change that the copyright of what I write belongs to me, the author.
You can't make a commercial competitor of this printer using their design, but using the printer for its intended purpose (printing) is obviously unrelated to that.
> You can't make a commercial competitor of this printer using their design
Which means it's not open source. Open source means you have the right to distribute work however you want, including commercially, provided you also provide the source under the same license terms as the original.
The second you slap a non-commercial limitation on there, it ceases to be open source.
I didn't plan to go into the printer manufacturing business, and there's nothing more open, AFAIK. HP won't let you fix it when they brick your printer for not using their more expensive than blood ink.
It may be using a CC license, but nothing that's marked NC is meaningfully part of the commons. Yes, some guy can make a part to fix his printer, but that guy can't sell those parts to other people.
The existence of a service manual doesn't mean you can get parts once the company disappears or loses interest.
This is probably inevitable at this point and at least it's a legit licence and not the weird sad bespoke wobbly nonsense Prusa went with. They clearly need something like this for exactly the same reasons.
The blueprint will be open source and you could technically build it yourself if you have the patience. They are quite proud of how few parts are actually involved in it
As much as this is nice protect, and physical one so different things any, still you cannot give/sell some software/design/media and restrict who, where and how someone can use it (noncommercial, not in this country, not at that phase of moon) while calling it open source, public domain, or similar.
As long as softwsre isn't going to be proprietary, it is a good idea just shouldn't misguide about being open source.
I had an Epson Ecotank for a couple of years. The printer heads got clogged all the time. We bought a series of cleaning products to address it, they often solved the problem for only a few prints. We finally gave up and bought a Brother laser printer.
This project seems like it's trying to address a similar market to the Ecotank. What assurances can the project team provide that OpenPrinter will have better reliability?
I have an Ecotank and my parents have one too (data set size of 2 :). I've had it for 4-5 years now and it's superb for my simple use case (occasional low cost printing at home).
I did initially run into clogged heads too, until I scheduled a test print every month which uses all colors. That way no single color stays unused for too long, and it's been working like a charm ever since.
If the heads are already "degraded" there are two (or more?) cleaning programs available from within the official printer driver settings dialog. They did resolve my initial issues.
Epson could definitely do a better job of informing users though by slapping a big warning on the thing saying "you need to print something every X days to avoid issues".
If you print occasionally then laser is the best option. It's just not usable for photo printing. You ideally want to be using the printer every week or two with inkjet.
Ecotank printers are worse in terms of clogging problems, because there is a tank and a hose vs a sealed cartridge. The ink has to flow through the entire system and that means you will have to print at least once a week.
It sounds like OpenPrinter will be using existing ink cartridges with the print heads built-in; I presume they will therefore have the same reliability.
I also had an Epson ink-tank printer (I don't think it was an Ecotank model name, but similar idea) for several years, battled print head clogs all the time. Found that Windex worked pretty well for dissolving the clogs. (The dad from My Big Fat Greek Wedding was right about something!) But what eventually got me to switch was that the maintenance cartridge — the big sponge under the printer that soaks up the ink pushed through the heads during a head-cleaning operation — was getting full, and it's not a user-serviceable component in Epson printers! They wanted me to ship it off to their service center, and pay who knows how much to swap out the maintenance cartridge. Nope, not gonna do that.
Ditched Epson for Canon. I've had my Canon ink-tank printer for a couple years now. Had ONE serious clog that required multiple flushes to clear the clog, but mostly it's been clog-free. But the best part is that I can just order a new maintenance cartridge from Canon for about $12 + shipping. So when it fills up (probably in another couple years) I can just swap it out myself and keep on printing.
Won't ever buy another Epson printer again. Canon has been great so far.
I really love the idea of a paper roll rather than individual sheets. Being able to print out to the size you want rather than only in pre-set sizes is quite cool.
I follow this project thanks to CrowdSupply from which I regularly buy open hardware.
Honestly I'm torn on this one. I will probably buy it but from a purely philosophical standpoint. Why? Well I do have a black & white HP laser printer that I've been using with my Linux devices for years now. It just works. There are a lot of terrible printers out there with wacky firmwares pinging home to their manufacturers. Some require ink with DRM, some companion apps, etc.
But... and that's my main point, are just basic printers that work anywhere with anything. There are quite a few to the point that among peripheral printers might be one of the safest one can safely "yeah it will probably work with open system no problem" relatively confidently (still do check first).
So... yeah it's cool but in terms of openness of our entire IT ecosystem printing doesn't appear to me as the priority gap to fill.
In all honesty for years I had one in my small home office, and every time I printed something I could smell it in the room afterwards for an hour, sometimes even getting headaches from this. Switched to inkjet a few years ago and will never look back.
It's interesting how that has changed. Printing used to soak up a big part of corporate IT's time and budget. It was generally thought of as the most annoying part of the job.
Good thing they're not selling a printer then, they're selling a parts kit that you have to flash an open source controller firmware to and assemble yourself. Or you may just source them in any way you want. You can't really "outlaw" open source, we had this whole song and dance with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
TL;DR: I'm surprised this isn't a laser printer, as those are actually quite a bit easier to design and manufacture, especially if you can use a cheap, older, commonly available, remanufacturable toner cartridge.
There are still quality laser printers on the market without extortion and surveillance built-in, unlike inkjets. The need for an open laser printer is less dire than for an open inkjet.
And not a single solid-ink-onto-paper sublimation printer, that I'm aware. There are badge printers still using a dye-sub ribbon, but the Tektronix Phaser, later the Xerox Phaser, is completely gone.
I wonder why. Were the consumables too cheap and the printers too reliable to be commercially viable? Did color laser printers catch up in terms of print quality? Did it have some other fatal flaw?
Hot melt ink/solid ink has a laundry list of problems that complicate it.
- A single ink clog can destroy a printhead.
- partial clogs can result in ugly messes with ink smeared all over the pages and the assembly further smearing on later prints.
- the printer has to be calibrated to the specific formulation of solid ink to work properly. A bad ink batch or calibrating to the wrong formulation (or a drift in specs on the formulation) can cause clogs, print head failures, etc.
- solid ink printing massively complicates lamination if that's something you need to do (ex in an office).
Overall it's a far more unforgiving process. You can't really have aftermarket inks like you can with modern inks and even variations in the first party manufacturing process can have catastrophic effects on the print hardware.
Every manufacturer volunteered to rob their own customers of anonymity. Even at the OS and application level (Adobe) people are being tagged with robust watermarks. In general, still no one cares. =3
This feels like a bit of a "you must exist in society" situation. If you rule out every company that does any business with Israel you will have a hard time buying anything.
I was hoping to see a printer that say a prepper could build from scratch. This design 100% depends on commercial print cartridges containing the actual print-head. Once that clogs, you need to get another one, good luck getting one once production has stopped.
Also, if you wanted to avoid yellow dots, not sure if this is built into the cartridge or the firmware of the rest of the printer.
Now, I understand that would be hard to pull off. Maybe one could build a deskjet500 equivalent one.
Laser printers are quite complex as well, you need too many non-easy to build from scratch parts.
Maybe a dot matrix printer is possible.
I know for sure you can retrofit older electric typewriters, and those are pretty repairable.
"From scratch", ie raw materials only, probably limits the results to plotters until you've bootstrapped some presicion machinery. And electronics. How many parts you're allowed is going to be an arbitrary choice anyway.
But the heads being disposable and one day unavailable is kind of a valid concern if a new source doesn't eventually turn up.
I had thought about a post-apocalyptic prepper printer once, my conclusion was that you can just have a fax machine and a laptop. They're considered thoroughly obsolete, and almost free to take in used markets as well.
Been waiting for framework to make a regular 2D printer, of any kind, would buy at least two instantly. I will never, never, never buy a fing printer from hp/canon/epson/brother/etc with anti-consumer tech, I rather die.
To be less facetious though, this seems like a nice project (*), but I print so much less these days than in the past. I printed a lot of color stuff when I was in school; but these days I just settle for black/halftoning from a laser printer, for when I actually need something printed, and color on screen only.
---
(*) - except perhaps for the NC restriction in the license.
It's such a good idea as a project and by the looks of things well executed. I also feel the style of the printer and the fact it can be a roll of paper will lead to interesting project ideas.
>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
close, but not quite. I suppose in the way that originally set him off, yes.
It looks like they're using the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license so restricting commercial use which I think would run afoul of the purists definition of Freedom?
It's a cool printer, and I'd much rather have something like this!
Does "open source" even mean something anymore, or should we give up and just accept it as common catch-all phrase for everything that suck less, without one definition?
Open source AI without a source. Open source software, oh but only up to 4000 users after two years of release for people on south hemisphere. Now open source hardware but your copies of design are for noncommercial use, only our copies are not restriced.
If they don't do this (noncommercial, patent), the lesson is that a succession of Chinese vendors will take it and perhaps even secure patents on top of their work. They want time to finish it their way.
My point is not whenever this is good or bad, hardware tools cannot by nature be self-replicated like software tools, but they should not call it open source.
Interesting comment from last time this was posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48093670
Inkjet printing requires orders of magnitude more engineering expertise, materials science, industry experience and financial resources than most people imagine. That is the reason, open inkjet printers don't exist despite having been consumer products with the same drawbacks for more than forty years. That is why this is a pre-crowdfund landing page without a demonstrating a working prototype. I would like to be wrong, but I expect you to be waiting a long time. An inkjet printer is not a collection of off the shelf parts. It is a machine that operates at the edge of chemistry, fluid dynamics, and electro-mechanical design...you have to place tiny tiny drops of liquid ink on commodity wood pulp with precision under arbitrary environmental conditions, get that ink to dry on the wood pulp, but not in tank or nozzel, while producing acceptable color, durability, and ease of use. Also lawyers...there are patents.
I noticed that previous post is from a couple of months ago, and it looks like about a week ago they posted a project update and they claim for their current prototype: "We are successfully printing in both black and full color." https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer/updates/...
Of course I have no way of verifying either way. Still I do think the project looks quite interesting, I'm in the market for a printer and this is certainly the most interesting one I've seen in a while.
There's a video of the prototype printing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB7iAFXCJQM
On the technology side, I'm somewhat hopeful because it looks like they're using off-the-shelf HP ink cartridges for this. HP cartridges embed the printhead into the cartridge itself, and that printhead is arguably the most complicated part of the entire device. Outsource the printhead, and you're just designing a plotter with a PCL interface.
I agree that the bigger challenge is going to be patents.
It also wouldn't surprise me to see HP add DRM to cartridges to authenticate the printer itself if this catches on. (Possibly requiring a printer driver/firmware update.)
Impression v. Lexmark is directly relevant to the patent situation here; in a case involving reprogrammed ink cartridges, the Supreme Court held that patent rights are exhausted by first sale doctrine; that is, if you sell me something patented, you can't sue me for patent infringement for using the thing you sold me, even if I do something later that makes you upset.
It's also been widely held that ink cartridge compatibility tools/hacks are allowed under DMCA.
However, it does seem likely that there's probably some shenanigan involved in the area - one example I could think of would be if HP have patented the way the ink cartridges are retained in the printer, for example, that would have to be carefully audited. And there will be license and trade secrets issues with the use of the cartridges, although if they were reverse engineered cleanly and the printer doesn't come with cartridges, those are probably pretty easily side-stepped.
These cartridges were first released in 2004, and there don't seem to have been any major design changes since then. The electrical and digital interface for printing has remained the same, as well as the mechanics. There is a new DRM system using another chip, but that is one-way - ie. It prevents an original printer from using the cartridge, but doesn't prevent use of an original cartridge by a third party printer.
Any patents are probably expired or very close to it.
A sea of patents designed to inhibit competition & promote rent extraction, and we are running around in circles chasing our tails wondering how we can compete with China.
China is changing stance on patents... Thier companies are now filing for patents at great speed, and I wouldn't be surprised if they start mass suing American companies for violations.
I could totally imagine a rapid upheaval of the patent system as soon as we see it being used against us.
The cartridge heads have a super curious digital protocol - the cartridge electronics have no power supply. There is no power rail internally either.
Instead they use the fact mosfet gates have capacitance, and can therefore store 1 'bit' of information. Through a network of hundreds of MOSFETs, the right bits can be put on all the nozzle gates as needed, and then a 'fire' pulse is sent which for around a microsecond turns on a tiny heater (or not, depending on mosfet gate state). The heater boils some ink, making a pressure wave which travels down a pipe and makes a drop of ink fly out towards the paper. That heating and cooling again can happen around 10,000 times per second per nozzle (and there are ~300 nozzles).
I suspect this decision is because the custom silicon process needed to manufacture these nozzles is cheaper if they only have n type MOSFETs - and without p type MOSFETs you can't make a typical push pull logic gate.
The nozzles themselves are quite a lot of silicon - perhaps 100mm^2, with deep etched holes, and are effectively disposable, so I assume huge efforts have been taken to reduce costs - including this curious electrical design.
The protocol also is hugely irregular, which I suspect might be to avoid any wires on the chip needing to cross eachother.
> I agree that the bigger challenge is going to be patents.
Surely most/all of the patents around the actual inkjet printing function have expired though, right? I had inkjet printers in the mid 00s and if anything I feel like your average inkjet is worse these days.
In medicine, it's a regular trick to find some new patentable formulation or tweak to switch to manufacturing shortly before the original patents expire, so that you continue to have a patent-protected product.
It would not surprise me if something similar was happening here: HP's current cartridges have at least one piece that is under active patent protection and they don't manufacture any designs that have no patent protection. I don't know enough to state that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Maybe they should have purchased a design from Canon or someone that isn't really in this market anymore. It seems like not only are they locked into a specific older technology generation (which could be ok idk) but they also risk HP just discontinuing that cartridge. It seems like the printers for this cartridge were released around late 2017 so they could deprecate earlier than they normally do. Seems like they provide 10-20 years typically. At the same time , maybe this is just meant for a small user base of nerds and maybe HP wont care.
Canon is still in the market, they just supply parts and license IP to the printer manufacturers like HP. They make some high value stuff to sell to the OEMs but I don’t think they can make a whole print head anymore.
Why would they bother? They make all their money on the ink cartridges. If this drives more cartridge sales it’s a win/win for them. They generally don’t make much, if anything, on consumer ink jet printers themselves
It’s negligible revenue and carries some risk. Say the printer works well, and these enthusiasts drive a couple of thousand more cartridge sales. And that encourages someone to develop an alternative cartridge, which is mechanically and electrically compatible with HP’s.
It just seems easier to fire off a cease and desist than to take a risk of other people messing around with your ecosystem.
> And that encourages someone to develop an alternative cartridge, which is mechanically and electrically compatible with HP
This already happens for basically every commercially-available ink cartridge.
big companies seek control, not money, because money alone is a weak shield against disruptions
> Why would they bother?
Many corporate and government types, especially lawyers, want control. They will go broke trying to control everyone and everything.
The crowdsource page says it has refillable ink tanks rather than cartridges. Unless they are modifying HP cartridges, which is probably not smart from a legal standpoint.
The tech specs say it uses HP 63 cartridges (or HP 302/803 outside the US), and that the cartridges can be refilled using a refill kit.
The photos clearly show HP cartridges installed.
I don’t see why HP would want to do that. They have huge margins on ink, right? I’m sure the increase in cartridge sales would offset lost subscription revenue from useless cloud services, if only because the people who are gonna use an open source printer would never pay for that anyway.
Looks like the intended use case here is you buy the cartridge once, and refill it, and OpenPrinter won't lock you out after doing so like HP does.
Yea, but then the print head clogs up after the second time you refill it and you buy another expensive print head + ink from HP.
Frankly, I think 99% of the reason they started integrating the print head with the cartridge was to avoid all the problems you so frequently see on printers that don’t use disposable heads.
Yeah, if you’re buying the ink they would be happy, I’d think. The ideal razor-and-blades business model!
The single hardest part is the print head. If you can reuse an existing one, and you can, then you're most of the way there.
The paper path itself is mechanically involved, but not to an impossible degree - it's hard to make it work, but it's not MEMS magic, it's manufacturable in the same way advanced 3D printers are manufacturable.
The fact the campaign is run on crowdsupply makes me a lot more hopeful it'll get to market vs a site like kickstarter. Crowdsupply requires a working prototype before launching and they provide all the expertise to actually get projects to market, off the top of my head I don't believe any crowdsupply project has failed to deliver.
From the specs:
So they just use HP inkjet technology. That makes it less open-source, but even "open source" parts are going to be under non-commercial license (CC BY-NC-SA) anyway.I suspect it's because the protocol for driving those cartridges is known and others have used them:
https://spritesmods.com/?art=magicbrush
https://spritesmods.com/?art=inker
Make sense. But at the same time sounds like another way to support the biggest predator in that space, no?
> even "open source" parts are going to be under non-commercial license (CC BY-NC-SA) anyway
You're saying this as if it is a bad thing? I absolutely welcome this decision by the authors!
Non commercial licenses are not generally considered open source
Yes
But how important?
If it is not an open source license, you should not call it open source.
Imagine someone saying the same thing about MongoDB's license, for example.
Is there a Linux server run on fully open source hardware (what would that mean btw?)? Should we stop using "open source" because almost all computers are not fully open source?
Quite a lot of open source hardware is licensed under the BY-SA Creative Commons license which is an actual open source license. E.g. the Arduinos and things like the Milkymist One which can actually run linux.
Why? Restricting it in this way doesn't make sense to me.
If we have a common design them surely we want people to be able to build their own, or buy a prebuilt?
Why is the CC BY-NC-SA stopping me to build my own?
I didn't say it did.
If it is a noncommercial licence then it removes the other option to set up a business selling these pre-built. Not everyone wants to build a printer.
dmca?
99% of this is the printhead and the ink formulation. Assuming you use generic off the shelf solutions for those two components you’re set. All the printer companies do their lock in at the firmware and software layer.
Yeah, I found that original comment to be a bit nonsensical. It would be like arguing you can't build your own PC because the lithography tech needed to make modern ICs is really complicated. I wasn't planning a laying out my own chip, and these guys aren't planning on building their own printhead from scratch.
yes, I was about to build another gaming PC, and then I remembered the ASML machine costs 20 bajillion. Will wait for the ASML machine to come down in price, to around couple of grand.
There's also the long term strategy where if they can sell enough printers, they may at some point in the future do get the budget needed to make their own print head. It's not like printers were invented in 2026.
At the 2400 DPI that an HP printer can handle, the printer needs to place the head at 1/100 mm precision three times for every single dot on the page, and not smear them, despite not knowing what thickness or weight or finish the paper has. That is not trivial.
2400 dpi is not the bar for entry, though. Even 240 would qualify as a printer, albeit not a good one (SOTA in 1995 maybe).
I have enormous respect for dot matrix printers. They're easy to repair and service, the tech is relatively simple, it's cheap, it's parts are cheap, its supplies are cheap. It's way more sustainable than any other printer: both the printer itself in its manufacturing and the ribbons themselves. The waste they produce is also much less polluting than any other printer.
They also kind of suck. I'm not one for "the latest and greatest", but their output quality is atrocious compared to modern printers, they're loud AF, and I'm guessing it may have existed but I never saw a dot matrix that didn't have the perforated edge for feeding.
There was no reason to sell a dot matrix printer that wasn't compatible with tractor feed. Especially when some of the biggest uses of those printers required that stock. Doesn't mean they required tractor feed paper to operate.
A Matrix printer is essentially a typewriter with extra steps and typewriters had been eating any paper for .. a century before?
Dot matrix can handle regular A4 paper since the late nineties.
They're noisier than ink printers, but non-industrial quality can be pretty reasonable for office-level noises.
Quality certainly isn't on par with laser printers, but for text (both Latin and CJK), it's perfectly clear.
I think that’s a product of their time rather than the dot matrix tech itself. Paper feeding is hard. Tractor strips made it easier.
Dot Matrix are still used in outdoor / high humidity environments in USA.
A lot of car shops with regular 100% humidity conditions will swear by dot matrix + tractor for feeding paper + printing. Plus, the carbon copy forms are guaranteed to be exact carbon copies which also leads to legal guarantees about copies of paper being provably exactly the same in the court of law.
Pen plotters could accept sheets of A4 and very precisely position them since at least the 80s. I'm surprised that dot-matrix printers didn't adopt similar technologies sooner, though it could be because by the mid-80s dot-matrix printers were the budget option, fanfold paper with the tractor strips was still abundant, and it was much easier to just stick with the cheaply manufacturable technologies rather than take the risk of innovation with a product that wouldn't sell upmarket anyway.
Were A4 plotters that much of a thing? I'd thought plotters were usually larger format (A0-A2 sort of size) for engineering drawings etc. Also iirc they were insanely expensive compared with your standard microcomputer dot-matrix printer.
I certainly don't have deep knowledge in this area but my understanding is that the cartridge is basically a cavity with a small hole at the bottom and a piezo electric element at the top to sputter liquid down. The tolerances are tight but considering how advanced manufacturing is, I would imagine someone competent could design and prototype it with the tools and manufacturing ecosystem that's available now.
There's at least one project that has tried to design an actual DIY/open-source inkjet printer [0], along with inkjet print heads [1].
The ink most likely need some special sauce? But I imagine there's many organizations that can specialize in making the ink so that it can be treated close to a commodity. If not, maybe this can also be engineered?
[0] https://hackaday.io/project/167446-diy-inkjet-printer
[1] https://reprap.org/wiki/Reprappable-inkjet
This printer uses HP 502 cartridges. Readily available, but don't expect to save on ink costs compared to a regular HP printer.
They do claim that this printer will print in black when the colour cartridge is empty, which they imply is not possible with common printers. The only time I ever encountered that I simply removed the colour cartridge and the printer was happy to print in black.
It really makes more sense to just buy a laser printer, in almost all cases.
Except when you need to ocassionally print/copy in color, in which case inkjets are more economical.
Even if you can afford a color laser, the problem is a color MFP (ie including a scanner) occupies a lot more space compared to a equivalent inkjet, and for some people this could be a deal breaker.
Yeah conceptually this excites me but I decided color printing wasn't worth it at home years ago and haven't regretted it.
A colour laser A4 multifunction is only a few hundred bucks these days, five years ago I’d have agreed with you but it might be worth re-evaluating.
I've reevaluated.
Still not worth it. My Brother is hitting 10 years now, and I'm trying to think of many scenarios where I really needed to print colour at home.
I don't think this was a mono vs color argument but rather ink color vs laser color.
If you go with a laser color printer you will have to buy four toners instead of one.
I have all Brother printers too, they seem to be the only brand that's not actively trying to screw their customers. My B&W laser at home is on its second drum and still soldiering on, we got an A4 colour laser multifunction for work which does double sided document scanning and printing and it was... I think $380 or something, five years ago. Would buy again. I don't really need colour but it's nice.
I'd have to buy a printer tho. The one I have has done its job for a decade and I think I've bought a grand total of one offbrand toner cartridge in that time.
Ever look at how much energy a laser printer uses?
Extremely little? High quality inkjets may make sense for corporate or industrial uses, but the majority of home/consumer use cases probably print very infrequently these days. In that scenario inkjet is pretty bad because the ink dries out between uses - there is a reason it's such a common trope that inkjets never work right when you need them.
I switched to laser because I only print like maybe once a month on average (but when I need it, I need it). I'm not the slightest bit worried about the delta energy usage between my laser printer or the inkjet, and I'm sure the inkjet came out worse given the number of cartridges I had to throw away or paper I wasted printing diagnostics.
None, in the months (sometimes years) it spends switched off (off, not standby) between print jobs. It's a quarter of a century old and I can still get replacement cartridges when I need them.
Are you counting the energy used for print head cleaning, and to manufacture all the wasted ink?
Generic inkjet cartridges (including the nozzles) and ink are readily available. The head movement and is easier then a 3d printer, the will be some learning's for the paper handling but seems very achievable to me.
Looks like this printer uses HP 85 ink cartridges, so the hardest bits of the engineering are being bought in from HP.
The rest of a printer aren't too hard to design and make, especially if you don't have super tight budget constraints.
Lol then 3D printing must be space technology that only the most advanced materials labs in the world can achieve, yeah inkjet is not simple, but it’s also not magic,
The issue is mainly the nozzle. Ironically 3D printers are a lot easier there, since you just need to melt a thick wire, and not worry about microscopically small droplets.
That's why this is just using off the shelf cartridges with commercial heads.
Which is why its more surprising this was first announced last year and there's no Proof of Concept demo yet?
But really, I've given up on ink jet printers, and have gone the cheap B&W laser route for anything I need to print at home (In the past year, 2 times, a backup ticket and some paperwork that needed a real signature sent back).
But when I had them, the thing that went bad 99.999% of the time was the cartridges or a clogged nozzle on the head. So the advantage here, on the repairability side not DRM, is the rails and motors?
Also that cutter is going to be a pain, having worked on Lightjet printers, that cutter was nearly all field service issues until the FEs started leaving the "laser" key so lab managers could reset the blade themselves.
An open source all-in-one-printer would be a great device to have. For eg I would love to have the scanner include a camera. So I can get “instant scans” most of the time, and a higher res scan when needed. Maybe the camera could also notice when the person making copies or scans forgot their original and ping them?
The required super wide field of view for the camera could be tricky, without making the box really deep. Or am I not thinking about it right?
You'd probably need some basic custom lens (not crazy $$) that would distort the heck out of the image, but you could correct the shape in software. Given that GP wanted this to be the "low quality / high speed" secondary scanning option, the inevitable loss of quality would be acceptable.
Seeing chromatic aberration on a document scan would be strange, but this is basically how many document scans are created today (using phone camera + software correction). It's just the lens effects from this cheap lens would be a lot worse than what Apple/Samsung/Google can do with their super expensive to design custom lens stacks.
That's pointless when ADF scanners will do a dual-side scan, at around 2-3 seconds per page, and more importantly, can do so with a stack of pages.
They've been around long enough that you can find them all over the place used for quite cheap and they likely only need a cleaning.
The second part is verbose but say absolutely nothing of the difficulty and issues. It could be applied to anything, even cooking a steak
isn't inkjet an outdated tech by now?
Offices, maybe. Photography, not at all. Some photographers prefer inkjet over minilab.
How so?
laser printers are cheap and don't need catriges
Color laser printers (MFPs with ADFs to be exact) aren't exactly cheap. Last I checked they were 2-3x more expensive than equivalent inkjets, and occupied a lot of space too.
I mean, there's a video:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XB7iAFXCJQM&t=17s&pp=2AERkAIB
Sure it could be fraud but it could also just work.
Try to find an typical consumer inkjet printer on AliExpress, you won't find any, or if you do, it will be someone reselling the usual brands like HP or Canon. You will find label printers, industrial printers, 3D printers, thermal printers, and all sorts of weird stuff, but none of them able to put ink on a stack of A4 paper.
If the Chinese, who are known for being able to make knockoffs of everything are not able to make inkjet printers, this should tell you how hard it is.
It addition to the print head, reliable paper transport is also really hard. That problem is often sidestepped by using a paper roll or by printing one sheet at a time, as it is the case for the Openprinter.
No.
Per Google, most HP printers are made in China.
A more likely explanation has to do with the economics of ink jet printers. The ink sales are so profitable that HP and other manufacturers subsidize their printers. This leads to prices at or near cost.
Since Ali express vendors can't count on follow on ink sales, they can't compete on price. And competing on price is Ali express's reason for existence.
So, ink jet printer are harder to find on Ali express. At least, low end consumer focused ink jet printers.
Laser printers, which aren't subsidized are common
Several Chinese companies have their own domestic laser printers, claiming of in-house components and development (Cumtenn, ZoneWin), and one company does inkjet printers in addition to lasers (Deli Printer).
https://www.delioa.com/products/a4-inkjet-printer/
ZoneWin, a laser printer company, made a clone of both HP LaserJet 1020 and LaserJet M1005, which reuse most of the original/compatible parts (Q2612A cartridge). They claim it's 100% domestic parts only.
https://www.rtmworld.com/news/new-chinese-made-printer-uses-...
I think the top-ranking comment about complexity is off base: they're not inventing inkjet printing from scratch. It's basically a bunch of existing modules in a new package, presumably with the promise that you will not need to buy subscriptions or DRMed ink cartridges.
Is robustness and reparability a compelling pitch? If I'm counting right, I owned eight different printers in my life. Dot matrix, dye sublimation, inkjet, laser. I don't think a single one ever required any serious repairs beyond replacing consumables, clearing paper jams, and pulling out lint. I upgraded as the technology improved. My first laser printer needed about 4x as much desk space as the current one.
> I don't think a single one ever required any serious repairs beyond replacing consumables
I think your experience has been an outlier. I've had several printers from different brands also, and have had some that last a long time, and still print with decent quality even with off-brand ink/toner. However, quite a lot have also failed due to bad capacitors, bad power modules, or the printer or it's firmware just refused to work/print for whatever reason and the manufacturer response was: "buy a new one." There's definitely planned obsolescence built into these machines, and that's why people dislike them, aside from the fact they can be a pain to configure. That's in addition to the ink DRM and other shitty cartel like bs from printer manufacturers.
I owned a Brother inkjet for some time. I'd print maybe a few times a year. But it seemed like every time I needed to print, the printer was out of ink. Granted I used an ink service (ie not official brother ink) but still where the heck was the ink going?
I've since switched to a Brother LaserJet and I'm still on the starter toner after a couple of years.
An inkjet printer has to be used at least monthly if not more often. If you left it plugged in, the printer was likely squirting ink in to a waste tank to prevent the nozzles from drying out and ruining the printer.
Laser toner can sit unused without drying out (it's dry powder already).
The most compelling argument for me is this:
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...
Are any of those printers inkjets? I think tracking dots are strictly a laser printer thing.
Do you have any recommendations for models or what should i look out for ?
My mom wanted a printer for her birthday and it's been a few months without any success when it comes to selecting the right model
I would highly recommend getting a laser, especially if she isn't doing a huge amount of printing. You can leave them forever without printing and they'll just spin up and work in an instant. Both B+W and color ones are really decently priced these days.
I want to second this: Unregular use is compelling use case for a laser printer.
If she wants to print words or shapes on paper, then a laser printer is perfect. If non-photographic color is also useful, then a color laser printer is fine. They're happy with heavy usage, and ~zero usage, and everything in between. Brother is the answer here; they tend to be low-bullshit.
If she wants to print color photographs regularly and absolutely doesn't want to wait for them, then: Some manner of inkjet. Brother inkjets take care of themselves (as long as they're powered up) with a ~daily automated song-and-dance to help avoid the head-clogging issue that many other inkjets face, but even then it's a more fickle technology than laser printing is.
It's also important to compare the price/convenience of printing photos at home to having someone else do it. Buying high-quality prints (whether from online services that deliver by mail or from the local pharmacy or big box) can be cheaper and better quality than doing it at home, and make maintaining the printing machine someone else's problem.
(edit- I unintentionally left it to implication, but: If she wants to print color photographs only once or twice per year, then... she's probably way, way better off by not doing that at home. At all.)
I never had problems with Brother for laser and Canon for inkjet. The models I have are no longer being manufactured, so I can't recommend anything specific. I did my best to stay way from HP for inkjet, they always had bad rep.
> Is robustness and reparability a compelling pitch? If I'm counting right, I owned eight different printers in my life.
Like the other commenter mentioned, I think your experience is likely an outlier. But more to the point, the way printer companies make money (lose money on the printer, make it up on ink), the couple times my printer has broken, I just bought a brand new printer. I'm sure the printer probably could have been easily fixed but it wasn't even like that was a decent option.
This printer probably isn't for everyone but there are enough of us who are so fed up with "subscription fatigue" and locked down devices that having a tool that I fully own and could fix if necessary is appealing.
I don't get why this isn't an ink tank printer. Yes, those HP cartridges are technically refillable, but the printheads tend to clog up after a few refills, and then you are stuck paying retail for another cartridge.
It would be a lot more aspirational to figure out how to build a tank-based printer (although maybe its not possible to compete with the incumbents on price in this space)
I suspect the hard bit is the print head. So they’re just buying that in.
> With Openprinter, you are free to choose between standard sheets or a roll of versatile paper.
A few other comments have concentrated on the printer head and ink cartridge, but the roll vs sheets interests me. Manipulating sheets of paper is actually quite a difficult problem to solve - and there is only a demonstration of paper placement. Loading page after page is actually really not easy at all. There is no example of it printing.
I see they got a nomination for a design award [1], which in my personal experience has been a negative signal for successful projects. On the same page they mention that they also mention that they don't even know how much this will cost yet:
> We know this is your most frequently asked question! Final pricing depends on a moving puzzle of production volumes, BoM costs, industrialization expenses, regulatory certifications, and final engineering developments.
On the crowd funding page it mentions for parts [2]:
> Main board: Raspberry Pi Zero W
> Cartridge board: STM32 MCU
Not a specific MCU variant, and the specifics of the Pi variant (i.e. RAM) are not mentioned. I would expect these parts would be locked in by now. I have a feeling that this is not quite as ready as made out - I think there is still R&D going on.
[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer/updates/...
[2] https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer
> specifics of the Pi variant (i.e. RAM) are not mentioned
I agree with the rest but Pi Zero W is a specific machine with 512 MB RAM:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/
It's also the one everyone can buy online for $19, not Pi Zero 2 W (always out of stock)
Pi Zero seems overkill to me for a printer.
It costs $20 and comes with wifi and bluetooth. Seems like a valid choice to me.
This is interesting, but it seems to be a crowdfunding campaign only. I wish them the best of luck (the cause is worthy for sure), but buyer beware at this point.
(I myself don't 2D print enough that an ink based printer makes sense for me. Ink tends to dry, so for me a laser printer that can sit for months at a time makes more sense. I use the scanner as well as my 3D printer far more often.)
I wonder how they will handle the nonsense around yellow tracking dots[1] etc. Hopefully that doesn't become a problem.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
> I wonder how they will handle the nonsense around yellow tracking dots[1] etc. Hopefully that doesn't become a problem.
What's there to handle? They just don't include them and there's no statute that requires them to.
Hm, I guess there is no law. But why would so many manufacturers include this unless there is some legal reason or other pressure on them to do so?
National security letters or old boys network or maybe just fat bribes to the right engineer. Could be a requirement for government procurement too, so not a law, just the requirement of a huge customer with deep pockets and negative price sensitivity.
>or other pressure on them
Counterfeiting was a big worry as high-resolution color printers became cheap. They did it motu proprio just like today ~all AI gen services watermark their outputs.
Unfortunately they mainly use Discord and Instagram. They post updates on Instagram regularly but are quite active on Discord and often ask for community feedback there and post updates there as well. I've been closely following them for a few months
The printer surveillance is my main draw to this project. EFF basically came to the conclusion that all Western printers likely have some sort of surveillance like that. I've confirmed with them on the Discord that they are not required to implement any such surveillance
From their FAQ:
> Open Printer is distributed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
The non-commercial clause makes it non-open by the commonly accepted term of "open" in this context.
Laser printers are so much more economical.
I use Brother black and white laser printer with after market toner cartridges from eBay .
Print around 200 pages a day.
Around 5000 pages for 37 AUD ie around 25 USD.
The paper costs more per page than the toner.
Just make sure you stay away from HP branded printers...
yeah, I have a cheap brother laser printer, I don't print that much, but it's been solid for several years. I did have an HP, but it was incredibly problematic, would jam rather easily. Works fine under linux as well.
Does the ink ever dry? That’s my biggest problem with non-lasers - I print maybe 10-100 pages a year but every time I need to change the toner because it’s too dry. And do you print color or no?
No doesn’t dry up. It’s why I change from inkjet. And yes they print colour too.
They are fine for documents but if you want details photo printing then inkjet I think has an edge, but for most people laser is better choice.
Unless I'm missing something using this in a commercial application would be a license violation:
> Open Printer is distributed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
> This means that everyone is free to use, share, and modify the project, provided they credit the original author, share derivatives under the same license, and do not use it for commercial purposes.
It's also not opensource yet, there's a vague mention of "when its ready" it'll be released.
What about that license makes you think you can't use the device (i.e. print things) for commercial purposes?
The license applies to the thing, not the thing you print using the thing. Me writing software or prose on a computer running Linux using a GPL editor wouldn't change that the copyright of what I write belongs to me, the author.
You can't make a commercial competitor of this printer using their design, but using the printer for its intended purpose (printing) is obviously unrelated to that.
> You can't make a commercial competitor of this printer using their design
Which means it's not open source. Open source means you have the right to distribute work however you want, including commercially, provided you also provide the source under the same license terms as the original.
The second you slap a non-commercial limitation on there, it ceases to be open source.
I didn't plan to go into the printer manufacturing business, and there's nothing more open, AFAIK. HP won't let you fix it when they brick your printer for not using their more expensive than blood ink.
Of course it's not open source, there's no source to even be open or closed yet! It is Creative Commons, though, which is different.
It may be using a CC license, but nothing that's marked NC is meaningfully part of the commons. Yes, some guy can make a part to fix his printer, but that guy can't sell those parts to other people.
The existence of a service manual doesn't mean you can get parts once the company disappears or loses interest.
It's open source : you have the right to study, copy, share and modify
This is probably inevitable at this point and at least it's a legit licence and not the weird sad bespoke wobbly nonsense Prusa went with. They clearly need something like this for exactly the same reasons.
Ugh yes agree, that Prusa one was a massive misstep.
> Open Printer is distributed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
So not open source.
OpenPrinter is the same as OpenAI. Nothing open about it.
The license doesn't apply to the things you print with it.
Are you miffed by the restriction on you selling derivative open printers?
Yes, because that's the thing that makes it open and able to survive the death or corruption of the entity holding the copyright.
The blueprint will be open source and you could technically build it yourself if you have the patience. They are quite proud of how few parts are actually involved in it
If it's CC-NC, it's not open source though, that's the point: a license that restricts fields of endeavor is not an open source license.
If nobody can sell me the printer or replacement parts for it after the initial vendor inevitably goes out of business, that's a problem.
They actually can sell you replacement parts, they just can't do it as a commercial endeavor. You have a point though.
As much as this is nice protect, and physical one so different things any, still you cannot give/sell some software/design/media and restrict who, where and how someone can use it (noncommercial, not in this country, not at that phase of moon) while calling it open source, public domain, or similar.
As long as softwsre isn't going to be proprietary, it is a good idea just shouldn't misguide about being open source.
I had an Epson Ecotank for a couple of years. The printer heads got clogged all the time. We bought a series of cleaning products to address it, they often solved the problem for only a few prints. We finally gave up and bought a Brother laser printer.
This project seems like it's trying to address a similar market to the Ecotank. What assurances can the project team provide that OpenPrinter will have better reliability?
I have an Ecotank and my parents have one too (data set size of 2 :). I've had it for 4-5 years now and it's superb for my simple use case (occasional low cost printing at home).
I did initially run into clogged heads too, until I scheduled a test print every month which uses all colors. That way no single color stays unused for too long, and it's been working like a charm ever since.
If the heads are already "degraded" there are two (or more?) cleaning programs available from within the official printer driver settings dialog. They did resolve my initial issues.
Epson could definitely do a better job of informing users though by slapping a big warning on the thing saying "you need to print something every X days to avoid issues".
what they really need is a built in print program that just prints a color exercise sheet every 2 weeks.
If you print occasionally then laser is the best option. It's just not usable for photo printing. You ideally want to be using the printer every week or two with inkjet.
Ecotank printers are worse in terms of clogging problems, because there is a tank and a hose vs a sealed cartridge. The ink has to flow through the entire system and that means you will have to print at least once a week.
Just bought a Brother ink tank printer (they have a whole line). Let's see how long it lasts.
Thirteen models that all look nearly identical and a website that doesn't even remotely help you distinguish between them.
I see the same people have been in charge of product design and marketing at Brother for the last twenty years...
It sounds like OpenPrinter will be using existing ink cartridges with the print heads built-in; I presume they will therefore have the same reliability.
I also had an Epson ink-tank printer (I don't think it was an Ecotank model name, but similar idea) for several years, battled print head clogs all the time. Found that Windex worked pretty well for dissolving the clogs. (The dad from My Big Fat Greek Wedding was right about something!) But what eventually got me to switch was that the maintenance cartridge — the big sponge under the printer that soaks up the ink pushed through the heads during a head-cleaning operation — was getting full, and it's not a user-serviceable component in Epson printers! They wanted me to ship it off to their service center, and pay who knows how much to swap out the maintenance cartridge. Nope, not gonna do that.
Ditched Epson for Canon. I've had my Canon ink-tank printer for a couple years now. Had ONE serious clog that required multiple flushes to clear the clog, but mostly it's been clog-free. But the best part is that I can just order a new maintenance cartridge from Canon for about $12 + shipping. So when it fills up (probably in another couple years) I can just swap it out myself and keep on printing.
Won't ever buy another Epson printer again. Canon has been great so far.
I really love the idea of a paper roll rather than individual sheets. Being able to print out to the size you want rather than only in pre-set sizes is quite cool.
I do wonder if they print end of page lines for you to cut afterward (sorry couldn't read the whole webpage, maybe they explained it)
I follow this project thanks to CrowdSupply from which I regularly buy open hardware.
Honestly I'm torn on this one. I will probably buy it but from a purely philosophical standpoint. Why? Well I do have a black & white HP laser printer that I've been using with my Linux devices for years now. It just works. There are a lot of terrible printers out there with wacky firmwares pinging home to their manufacturers. Some require ink with DRM, some companion apps, etc.
But... and that's my main point, are just basic printers that work anywhere with anything. There are quite a few to the point that among peripheral printers might be one of the safest one can safely "yeah it will probably work with open system no problem" relatively confidently (still do check first).
So... yeah it's cool but in terms of openness of our entire IT ecosystem printing doesn't appear to me as the priority gap to fill.
Cool project anyway!
What if I want a printer that won’t print traceable dots on everything I print?
Use a monochrome laser printer for your ransom notes.
In all honesty for years I had one in my small home office, and every time I printed something I could smell it in the room afterwards for an hour, sometimes even getting headaches from this. Switched to inkjet a few years ago and will never look back.
What was the printer?
I haven't experienced the odor of ozone when printing at home since my HP Laserjet 4 died from water damage 18 years ago.
My current Brother laser printer (an MFC-2750DW, IIRC) is so non-stinky that I haven't thought about for a very long time.
It's interesting how that has changed. Printing used to soak up a big part of corporate IT's time and budget. It was generally thought of as the most annoying part of the job.
2 questions :
* How can it can do 2-side printing ? (on a normal printer, you may print all the odd pages, turn the whole thing, and print all the even pages)
* Won't the cutter experience some wear ?
And then government will declare this printer illegal because of no yellow dots.
Good thing they're not selling a printer then, they're selling a parts kit that you have to flash an open source controller firmware to and assemble yourself. Or you may just source them in any way you want. You can't really "outlaw" open source, we had this whole song and dance with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
> Open Printer is distributed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Non commercial licences are not open source. https://community.oscedays.org/t/why-are-non-commercial-lice...
I talked a bit about this years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37007815
TL;DR: I'm surprised this isn't a laser printer, as those are actually quite a bit easier to design and manufacture, especially if you can use a cheap, older, commonly available, remanufacturable toner cartridge.
There are still quality laser printers on the market without extortion and surveillance built-in, unlike inkjets. The need for an open laser printer is less dire than for an open inkjet.
And not a single solid-ink-onto-paper sublimation printer, that I'm aware. There are badge printers still using a dye-sub ribbon, but the Tektronix Phaser, later the Xerox Phaser, is completely gone.
I wonder why. Were the consumables too cheap and the printers too reliable to be commercially viable? Did color laser printers catch up in terms of print quality? Did it have some other fatal flaw?
Hot melt ink/solid ink has a laundry list of problems that complicate it.
- A single ink clog can destroy a printhead.
- partial clogs can result in ugly messes with ink smeared all over the pages and the assembly further smearing on later prints.
- the printer has to be calibrated to the specific formulation of solid ink to work properly. A bad ink batch or calibrating to the wrong formulation (or a drift in specs on the formulation) can cause clogs, print head failures, etc.
- solid ink printing massively complicates lamination if that's something you need to do (ex in an office).
Overall it's a far more unforgiving process. You can't really have aftermarket inks like you can with modern inks and even variations in the first party manufacturing process can have catastrophic effects on the print hardware.
"There are still quality laser printers on the market without extortion and surveillance built-in"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
Every manufacturer volunteered to rob their own customers of anonymity. Even at the OS and application level (Adobe) people are being tagged with robust watermarks. In general, still no one cares. =3
Inkjet cartridges often contain the print heads; toner cartridges still need a fuser roll and imaging head to do anything.
Part of my point is that making a print head driver is, in general, harder than making a laser imaging head. A lot harder.
Of course the details of what specific parts are purchaseable on the open market can and will change this calculus a lot.
I want to buy one of these just to support projects like it.
When this is a good quality Laser printer let me know. Nobody really wants inkjet that's not for high end photo printing.
Would be interested in others take on this. Personally, I wonder:
- By rolling the paper, will it really stay flat after printing? - How easy / cheap will sourcing ink be?
Image loading is too fancy and went on a lunch break I think.
Seems interesting but I would like a laser version of this. Not ever going back to inkjet.
Isn't the paper feed the hardest part - the part that always gets jammed? I swear a paper roll is cheating.
It is cheating but it's very sensible cheating.
Unfortunate they rely on HP cartridges. HP is a priority BDS target: https://bdsmovement.net/boycott-hp
This feels like a bit of a "you must exist in society" situation. If you rule out every company that does any business with Israel you will have a hard time buying anything.
Unfortunately people still think BDS is relevant in any way.
Hanging it on a wall like that would be great in say a tiny house / limited space. But what about dust entry? I got cats.
HP will simply prevent them from buying their head + cartridge bundle. By legal or by controlling more strictly bulk purchases of replacement parts.
I was hoping to see a printer that say a prepper could build from scratch. This design 100% depends on commercial print cartridges containing the actual print-head. Once that clogs, you need to get another one, good luck getting one once production has stopped.
Also, if you wanted to avoid yellow dots, not sure if this is built into the cartridge or the firmware of the rest of the printer.
Now, I understand that would be hard to pull off. Maybe one could build a deskjet500 equivalent one.
Laser printers are quite complex as well, you need too many non-easy to build from scratch parts.
Maybe a dot matrix printer is possible.
I know for sure you can retrofit older electric typewriters, and those are pretty repairable.
"From scratch", ie raw materials only, probably limits the results to plotters until you've bootstrapped some presicion machinery. And electronics. How many parts you're allowed is going to be an arbitrary choice anyway.
But the heads being disposable and one day unavailable is kind of a valid concern if a new source doesn't eventually turn up.
I had thought about a post-apocalyptic prepper printer once, my conclusion was that you can just have a fax machine and a laptop. They're considered thoroughly obsolete, and almost free to take in used markets as well.
For some reason the 8 image grid only loads the first image, maybe there's no images to load?
Also the videos are choppy gifs, not working machine at this point I guess.
just in time. this will certainly juice development of the equally important open source fax machine.
Title Typo? Reparaible to Repairable?
How would they control the printed paper curling?
Isn't this hilarious:
> A patent as well as a design and model registration have been made to protect the technical architecture and design of Openprinter.
So, open as in OpenAI.
Been waiting for framework to make a regular 2D printer, of any kind, would buy at least two instantly. I will never, never, never buy a fing printer from hp/canon/epson/brother/etc with anti-consumer tech, I rather die.
Just buy used from this list
https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/printers/#Cheap%20used%20laser...
LASER
This is just the thing I needed 30 years ago :-(
To be less facetious though, this seems like a nice project (*), but I print so much less these days than in the past. I printed a lot of color stuff when I was in school; but these days I just settle for black/halftoning from a laser printer, for when I actually need something printed, and color on screen only.
---
(*) - except perhaps for the NC restriction in the license.
It's such a good idea as a project and by the looks of things well executed. I also feel the style of the printer and the fact it can be a roll of paper will lead to interesting project ideas.
how has no on mentioned the typo in the title
s/Reparaible/Repairable
*no one
>how has no on mentioned the typo in the title
Perhaps because it's irrelevant [0].
>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'll believe it when I see it
Richard they did it. You can rest now.
close, but not quite. I suppose in the way that originally set him off, yes.
It looks like they're using the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license so restricting commercial use which I think would run afoul of the purists definition of Freedom?
It's a cool printer, and I'd much rather have something like this!
How do they get a satan inside it, i thought demons were proprietary.
Please "repair" the title, maybe include OpenPrinter to start with, or solely.
Some previous discussion on the crowdfunding:
Inkjet printer with DRM-free ink will be launched via a crowdfunding campaign (2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45423404
I mean it’s about time a company makes a repairable and pro consumer printer. My god
I’ll believe this when I see it on GitHub - rooting for them
Does HP make money on printer sales? Ink is cash cow.
Can we expect photos to be looking nice?
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Does "open source" even mean something anymore, or should we give up and just accept it as common catch-all phrase for everything that suck less, without one definition?
Open source AI without a source. Open source software, oh but only up to 4000 users after two years of release for people on south hemisphere. Now open source hardware but your copies of design are for noncommercial use, only our copies are not restriced.
If they don't do this (noncommercial, patent), the lesson is that a succession of Chinese vendors will take it and perhaps even secure patents on top of their work. They want time to finish it their way.
My point is not whenever this is good or bad, hardware tools cannot by nature be self-replicated like software tools, but they should not call it open source.
Open source was always a ploy to water down libre/free.
is it better than a Brother printer, cause i've had one for like a decade and it's the shit