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Hacker News Hacker NewsInkjet 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.
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.
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/...
> 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.
(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.
> 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.
So not open source.
The continuous feed is nice though... I can see this used for banners like in the old sheet fed dot-matrix days... Print Shop Pro FTW!
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?
Non commercial licences are not open source. https://community.oscedays.org/t/why-are-non-commercial-lice...
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...
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!
Also, the bottom spinning button CTA doesn't read like a CTA to me. My skimming eyes almost missed, but YMMV.
Other than that - awesome project and godspeed OpenPrinter team!
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)
What's even the point of this landing page in this state?
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.
- By rolling the paper, will it really stay flat after printing? - How easy / cheap will sourcing ink be?
* 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 ?
> 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.
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.
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.
s/Reparaible/Repairable
Some previous discussion on the crowdfunding:
Inkjet printer with DRM-free ink will be launched via a crowdfunding campaign (2025)
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.