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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Unlike now, where instead of saying your hypothesis you're just letting every reader come up with what they think is a crazy conspiracy theory and ascribe it to you?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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!
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.
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(*) - 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
You're saying this as if it is a bad thing? I absolutely welcome this decision by the authors!
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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 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
What's there to handle? They just don't include them and there's no statute that requires them to.
So not open source.
Are you miffed by the restriction on you selling derivative open printers?
As long as softwsre isn't going to be proprietary, it is a good idea just shouldn't misguide about being open source.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 see the same people have been in charge of product design and marketing at Brother for the last twenty years...
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.
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?
- 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.
- By rolling the paper, will it really stay flat after printing? - How easy / cheap will sourcing ink be?
s/Reparaible/Repairable
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
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!
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.
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