Reparaible and open source paper printer(opentools.studio) |
Reparaible and open source paper printer(opentools.studio) |
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.)
Compatible cartridges
HP 63 and HP 63 XL (US)
HP 302 and HP 302 XL (Europe)
HP 803 and HP 803 XL (Asia)
You're saying this as if it is a bad thing? I absolutely welcome this decision by the authors!
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.
(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.
What's there to handle? They just don't include them and there's no statute that requires them to.
> 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.
So not open source.
Are you miffed by the restriction on you selling derivative open printers?
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?
- 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.
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.
Some previous discussion on the crowdfunding:
Inkjet printer with DRM-free ink will be launched via a crowdfunding campaign (2025)
- 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.