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Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#131

Post by analog31 »

In addition to what's been mentioned, printing has much tighter tolerance requirements, e.g., to distinguish between "h" and "b" at a small font size. It actually has to be a very good spatial representation of the design. And how cheap printers actually accomplish this with crude bits of plastic and stamped metal is pretty amazing.

On the other hand, 3d printed objects may only need to satisfy overall mechanical needs, or be suggestive of the shape that they model, to serve a purpose. Most 3d printing that I've seen needs a bit of hand tooling at the end, to really be useful.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#132

Post by pwinnski »

michaelt wrote: post #100
Nbox9 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember printing in 2000? Literally every printer was suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions. In 2020 a top consumer or business printer will not jam on you. The business printers in 2000 had slow processors and more ram. It was significantly bad that printing PDFs spent more time processing the file than putting toner on page. Finally, the interfacing for printers today is fanta…

> Do you remember printing in 2000? The impression I get from HN comments is users of monochrome business laser printers from 2000 are the only people who are happy with their printers :)

I use a monochrome laser printer from 2012, and I'm very happy with it, so you're not far off. :)

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#133

Post by wolrah »

teddyh wrote: post #36

I wish that the intelligence in printers would migrate back to the computer. Having printers with their own complex formats (PCL, PostScript, etc.) only makes them inscrutable and lends itself to proprietary competing formats and printouts which never gets quite right. I think the original NeXT machine was on the right track with their simple bitmap-only laser printer, where the PostScript processing was done on the…

That's interesting that you feel this way, personally I take the exact opposite position. I want printer drivers to be a thing of the past. I just want to pass the printer a file that represents a document and let it handle things for me. Some kind of standard format, probably something in the Postscript/PDF family tree.

Likewise for scanners. I want to just have a HTTP API or something like that where I just "GET" an endpoint and the scanner hands me a file in some reasonable format.

The drivers are always the worst part of devices that allow computers to interact with paper, so let's get rid of them altogether.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#134

Post by ezconnect »

Patents are not an issue on having opensource 2D printers but the average hackers don't have the manufacturing capability to make an inkjet print head. There are lots of design on the internet on how to build your own inkjet printer. I think it's not exciting enough to explore in a garage since we can pickup a decent printer from the garbage. I am more excited on parts I can salvage from an office printer than thinking of building a better one.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#135

Post by [deleted] »

lpfabiani wrote: post #7

I worked for a while in the R&D department of HP printer division. As @jacquesm said, good 2D printer costs peanuts. The amount of R&D in color quality, speed and other parameters is huge. There were a lot of teams involved: mechanical, electrical, software, chemical... And because of that investment, there are thousands of patents that the big players are continuously paying each other for. It's a very old market wi…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#136

Post by payne92 »

Related: I have a HP 4000 with duplex, which is an absolute unit (beast) of a small workgroup laser printer. It's 20+yrs old, still going strong and parts are easy to get.

BUT, it's compute bound with modern print jobs, and is missing modern protocols like Bonjour.

What if someone open sourced a legacy printer? I'd love to re-brain this printer.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#137

Post by ryanmarsh »

jancsika wrote: post #117
coldtea wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you remember printing in 2000? Literally every printer was suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions. In 2020 a top consumer or business printer will not jam on you. The business printers in 2000 had slow processors and more ram. It was significantly bad that printing PDFs spent more time processing the file than putting toner on page. All of that, including the interfacing are not rel…

Are you stating your last two sentences as the result of researching these issues? Because as a layperson, I would not have thought a company could get a patent on clicking a button to purchase an item online.

When you read HN comments it helps to preface them with “I feel like...”

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#138

Post by adwn »

criddell wrote: post #95
adwn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the main argument: It would take a lot of money and cross-domain knowledge to design and build a passable printer from scratch. Contrast that with software, where all you need is time and a low to medium power computer. In fact, compared to software open source , all other open source engineering is non-existent (relative to OSS, not in absolute terms).

Why would you design one from scratch? The hardware out there is excellent and inexpensive. Start with that and write the firmware in a similar way that the Magic Lantern group did for cameras.

> Why would you design one from scratch? The hardware out there is excellent and inexpensive.

I thought the discussion was about open source printers, not about open source printer firmware? Sure, you could probably reverse engineer the interface to the actuators and sensors, which would allow you to write open source drivers, but you'd still be stuck with the printer manufacturer's cartridges.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#139

Post by zdw »

michaelt wrote: post #100
Nbox9 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember printing in 2000? Literally every printer was suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions. In 2020 a top consumer or business printer will not jam on you. The business printers in 2000 had slow processors and more ram. It was significantly bad that printing PDFs spent more time processing the file than putting toner on page. Finally, the interfacing for printers today is fanta…

> Do you remember printing in 2000? The impression I get from HN comments is users of monochrome business laser printers from 2000 are the only people who are happy with their printers :)

If you have a basically bulletproof monochrome HP 4000 series or similar that has cheap cartridges that last 5-10k pages, easy/cheap maintenance (a whole new set of rubber rollers costs $30-50, and is basically the only part that wears out), and a low printing volume, I can totally see having a printer for 20 years.
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