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

Post by StavrosK » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

shiftpgdn wrote: post #121

_def wrote: post #61

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> the money is in professional printing, ads, designers, etc. And ink cartridges

That model is juuuuuust about dead. Canon/Lexmark/HP are now all pushing megatank/ecotank continuous ink systems. I bought a Canon Pixma G6020 for printing photos and I'm super pleased with it. It comes with enough ink to do 18,000 black and white pages and 6000 full color pages. Refills are around $40 for the set.

Post by COGlory » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

OliverJones wrote: post #175

COGlory wrote: post #163

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Unless the design has changed, there is a pad that absorbs overflow ink from cleaning the print heads. After some time, that pad will be full, and then the printer will refuse to ever print again. I've now had 2 Pixma G series break that way, with a third well set on that course.

I cleaned one of those overflow pad assemblies once, on an old Epson. I got several more years out of it. But what a disgusting job cleaning it was. It's a great huge tank with many layers of pads. Do they sell replacements? One guess.

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

Nbox9 wrote: post #90

kevstev wrote: post #86

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What kind of patents? I had tank of an HP laserjet 3 in the 90s, and patent life is 20 years. For the basic functionality, they should all be expired at this point, and the limiting factor at the time was the high cost of memory and compute. Shouldn't anything relevant have expired years ago? The first laserjet came out in 1984 it seems. Prices have come down, but I haven't seen any real innovation in printers (not t…

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…

Post by InitialLastName » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:07 PM UTC

detaro wrote: post #16

tweetle_beetle wrote: post #11

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I also wouldn't underestimate the challenge of moving paper. I once spoke to someone who worked for Kodak (or a similar company - it was a long time ago) who said that they acquired another printer company purely because their paper moving technology was excellent and it would have taken years to develop an equivalent quality of engineering internally. This was before the present day race to the bottom in the printer…

Yeah. printing on a single hand-fed sheet: probably "easy". Reliably going through a random pack of 500 pages, not so much. Something pen-plotters don't do (they typically want paper to be placed down for them, or work of a roll of paper), and the maybe 3D-printer equivalent of preparing the print bed and removing prints from it is a well-known source of problems and manual work.

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

zdw wrote: post #139

michaelt wrote: post #100

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> 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.