It’s an uphill battle in a world going paperless, but use cases will continue to exist for a very long time… so yes.
I don’t like multifunction devices. One thing breaks and the whole thing has to be thrown away. Better to keep printer and scanner separate. But, to save on desk space, I would personally like them to be modular and stackable — like four poster beds — with power and data relayed via the legs. Other modular components could be a spare paper store, and a spare ink cartridge store…
360-600dpi. 16bit grayscale. 32bit colour. No more, no less. Assume 80gsm plain paper will be fed into the thing and don’t cater to specialist media at all.
Just do away with cartridges altogether. We’ve had an Epson EcoTank printer for several years now. EcoTanks feature fixed ink tanks that you just top-up using a bottle whenever they run low. Cheap ink, less waste, and no unethical lock-in.
Where possible, plastic wear components should have 3D printing plans available for download, so that people could print their own when they break, or make use of online services that do the same.
All cosmetic plastic components should have plans available, so folks can go nuts and make it look the way they want it to. If the form-factor is ‘boxy’ then front/side/back panels will be basically flat plates, and can simply ‘slot in’ with barely any need for tools.
Don’t think this is practical on ink jets, if you are out of color and still try to print black only, that would pump air into the rest of the print head and that’s not good. You may need a radical head redesign since only the big players make their own. You may be able to get them from Seiko, they do supply a lot of third party manufacturers, but mostly in large format scene.
Yep, as simple as using a syringe and needle and possibly a vacuum clip to pull the ink trough the print nozzles if they are part of the cartridge. But this type of ink cartridge is on it’s way out, these are from another era where manufacturer would sell printer at a loss and make up the difference in super expensive ink cartridges.
For lasers, I’d love to see someone reverse engineer HP LaserJet 1010 and make it a bit faster. That thing died on me about a month back, and I got it second hand. It was only 18 years old.
For inkjets, I’m actually OK with Epson. Cheap first party ink (like less than 10€ per bottle), and if you get business class machines (Work Force series), they are very robust, like 100K+ pages robust. Far from perfect, but they get the job done.
I have a friend who had an office where they would run out of ink, and buy a new printer because the refils were more expensive than a new printer with ink. So they would buy multiple printers a year despite the existing one being perfectly fine.
This was terribly sad to hear. I’m glad it’s on it’s way out.
I just realized I didn’t know the difference between ink jet and laser. But it’s in the name and obvious now.
So perhaps that’s two separate designs / print heads? An Ink version and a Laser version.
See, I heard this, but the ink cartridges that come with printers are small. Like real small qty of liquid gold ink.
I promise that I am not wearing my tinfoil hat, but would a printer, need registering with the secret service/ blobs to introduce hidden dots/not print US currency?
Else we could just put green ink in the black bottles, and make money…
Only half joking, but there are standards, and I don’t know what rules would need to be in place?
Like, legit, the Big players deffo have to play by SS/Treasury rules, but presumably home hackers are fine… But once we start selling these modular units by the thousand… Then we might get a visit by guys in dark shades?
And, I presume the methods introduced, need to be kept secret, by design, else the actual counterfeiters would be able to work around them?
oh yeah the dots!! i forgot about that too. added to requirements.
I don’t really see this as a real concern in reality with a regular printer. It a different kinda paper and there’s UV ink and all sorts of identifiers.
basically this:
Either way it’s not really a reason to ban an open source printer. See also 3D printed guns.
Sounds extemely ambitious and complex to realize. Isn’t there any older printer with a modified firmware to allow most of the software features you mentioned? Also with the advent of 3D printing if there’s a mechanical part of a printer that breaks it’s not impossible to re-make it and print it.
If it were really an issue to print black and white when out of color ink, it would be a problem with printing exclusively in color or B&W anyway. The idea that there’s a problem there in the first place is manufactured, like every other problem printers have.
I think, though, with printing on the way out, the days of ink cartridges coming to an end, and all the cluster surrounding that, an open source 2D printer might become irrelevant, simply because the only way to sell a printer in the future might be to just… make it not suck. Make it a product people see value in, rather than a product inserted into peoples’ lives by bad regulations and an expectation of universality.
Not really, print head will still have ink, just not squirt it out. Air dries ink out, and the print head will move to cleaning position and spill some color ink into maintenance tanks even when you only print black. After the print is complete it will wipe the nozzles and seal the head to prevent drying.
There is no black only printing on ink jet without expanding some small amount of color ink too. Is this done on purpose as anti-consumer thing - I can’t say, but having separate ink pumps and nozzle control is more expensive.
There is progress however, at work we have a few modern Epson large format printers, and those can run color cleaning cycles in sets of two while older ones do full head clean or nothing.
Drying out happens whether you print or not, though. I didn’t put ink in my printerscannerfaxmachine because I never printed anything for years, and when I went to use it, it wouldn’t print. That doesn’t have anything to do with printing with black and white without color, that’s just a factor of time. That’s why your printer turns on and dumps ink periodically.
I could see the argument of “if you allow people to print black and white when they don’t have color, they won’t replace color and the color head will dry out” but… I don’t think the very small effect of printing black and white while the color head is running on empty will make much if any difference. You can just keep the head sealed/not pump that tube when there’s no color ink, so that’s a non issue, and even if they’re attached together, moving across the page isn’t going to generate enough airflow inside the head, and outside doesn’t much matter.
It’s really just another fake anticonsumer scare tactic.
Forget color and focus on B&W. Since the majority of printing is B&W anyway.
In the case of B&W: Laser might be the better way to go.
Forget ink. Sounds messy…
So that leaves 2 questions:
what does the software look like?
what does the hardware look like?
The software side:
What does the printer see when you send a job?
What does cups see when you print a document?
If you print pdf or a word document, surely the printer isn’t parsing those formats. What about an image? How does it get translated?
It converts the page descriptions produced by your application (put a paragraph here, draw a line there, and so forth) into something your printer can understand and then sends the information to the printer for printing.
And how about the print protocol for telling the print head where to go X,Y coords. Could it leverage something like G-code? Forget the 3rd axis.
Probably best to utilize existing protocols and technology where possible.
The hardware side:
Probably the more complex side of this equation.
Looking at 3D printers with laser engraver heads as an example. This gives you single sided B&W printing. You could flip the paper manually for 2 sided…
Flipping the paper would be the tricky part for double sided prints.
And what wavelength of light for the laser? Paper is very reflective being white. How many mW to safely and precisely burn? Don’t want to set the paper on fire…
You don’t burn the paper, you light up the drum that picks up toner powder where the light hits it, than it continuously rolls and leaves that dust on the paper, than paper goes trough heating element to bake it. No paper burning involved. That’s why it comes out warm, not because of the laser.
It a good candidate hardware-wise, relatively simple compared to more modern solutions and about 10X the build quality of modern HP junk. Spare parts are available, mostly you need some foil thingy that rips every 5 years or so and it’s the part of drum assembly. It is slow tho, but for home use, do you care?
Toner cartilages have cheap knockoffs available (but still not even close to Eco Tank style ink-jets), there is no chips for DRM and if you really want to you can refill them on your own but I don’t recommend it - it involves working with very fine dust.
I’d really like to see it retrofitted with say ESP32 to give it WiFi, Bluetooth and modern OS support without involving a print server.
I had an old lexmark printer that wasn’t used very often and the ink would dry out on the head. The secret to unclogging it was to spray a healthy dose of strong perfume on the cartridge head, that would also go through the rest of the printer. Print a test paper, to avoid half-empty letters in the first print, then have at it.
And the cartridge was refillable with a funnel cap head that was a bit larger than a syringe. I’d bet if I plugged it in and repeated the process, it would still work (it’s been off for years now), but I think it was low on ink last I used it, so I’d need to find some.
Modern printers that have USB A ports on them (made in the past 15 years or so), allow you to plug a thumb drive into them and use the tiny LCD to navigate to a file and print the file straight from USB. Jankier than CUPS, but I’m pretty sure there’s something happening on the printers to translate all the formats.
I think it’s easier to look at dot matrix printers, they were invented in the '50s or '60s, I’m sure it should be easy technology to replicate with the tooling we have today, maybe even make it higher resolution. Otherwise, I think thermal paper might be a safer option than precisely laser engraving non-treated paper using lasers and you can reverse engineer an old POS printer. But just like in treated laser engraving paper, you’d need the thermal paper for printing (not to mention thermal paper doesn’t last as long as ink).
that I am not wearing my tinfoil 
hat, but would a printer, need registering with the secret service/ blobs to introduce hidden dots/not print US currency?
