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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?

#211

Post by UncleEntity »

oalae5niMiel7qu wrote: post #195
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? 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. A cheap consumer printer will jam on you and tear the paper to shreds, yet the drivers are still proprietary and you still get ripped off on cartridges.

> ...and you still get ripped off on cartridges.

Yep, it's cheaper to buy a new crappy printer from, say, Fry's Electronics than it is to buy refill cartridges for the last crappy printer you bought that ran out of ink.

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

#212

Post by floatboth »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #116
Nbox9 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ink cartridges is only a $1B global industry [0]. That isn’t a small market, but the global printing industry, with all digital content being transferred onto any 2d mediums through automatic means is probably closer to $1T. Think about every book, every magazine, every coffee mug with a funny saying, every graphic TShirt. In the world. The ink cartridges are good money, but it’s not where the money is at. [0] https:…

That actually upsets me more: we're beset by stupid DRM and price-gouging on ink, and it's not even that profitable?

Are we anymore? I've been to an electronics store recently, most printers on display were ink tank models. Even HP ones!

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

#213

Post by dpryden »

toast0 wrote: post #189
zrobotics wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just point out the existence of the movie "office space" in here as evidence that yes, people were frustrated with printers. That movie came out in 1999, and the most iconic scene is the printer being smashed. That resonated for very good reasons, printers (and drivers) were almost more obnoxious back then than they are now. Please lose the superior "adult in the room" tone.

I mean, they were made because the printer was asking the player character to load letter paper, and they couldn't figure that out. Ok, I don't know what PC stands for, but load letter means you're out of paper, please fill me up. It's not a blinking clock on a VCR.

"PC LOAD LETTER" was a very common message on the old HP LaserJet Series II printers. This cryptic message on the tiny LCD display was short for:

PC: "Paper Cassette" Load: "out of paper, please load more" Letter: "US Letter size (8.5"x11")"

In some offices you'd be equally likely to see similar codes like "PC LOAD A4" or "PC LOAD LEGAL".

The LaserJet Series II and III didn't have paper drawers, but rather paper cassettes, which you could load with a stack of paper (maybe a few hundred sheets? less than half a ream IIRC), and then swap in and out of the machine as a unit.

Some models (I think it might have been an add-on peripheral for the Series II?) had two cassette slots, so you could load two supplies of paper at the same time. Either you could load the same size twice, in which case it would perform like a backup: if you ran out of paper in the first cassette, it would switch to the second cassette automatically but start flashing a light to tell you that it was time to reload the first one. Or you could load two different sizes, and it would select the right cassette to draw from based on the size of the document being printed.

The Series II didn't have a way to measure the size of the paper, so each cassette was designed for only one paper size. There was an interface where the cassette plugged into the printer which indicated which size paper it contained.

Due to the design of the paper cassette, it was very hard to tell from the outside how much paper was left. There was a tiny window but it was nearly opaque. IIRC later versions of the cassette improved this.

So if you had a model with only one cassette (which was fairly common, I think) and you loaded a "US Letter" size cassette, and it ran out of paper, the printer would refuse to print anymore until you gave it more paper. In the meantime the tiny LCD screen would flash "PC LOAD LETTER".

The printer was a workhorse and I can testify that many offices in my area were using 1980s-era Series II printers daily in 1999, when I had a part-time IT job that among other things involved doing maintenance on said printers. Replacing the rubber paper pickup roller and clearing paper jams out of the fusing unit were probably the two most common trouble cases, IIRC.

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

#214

Post by Jon_Lowtek »

jfengel wrote: post #204
pmontra wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded, however I don't expect our best aqueducts to last 2000+ years https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/11-...

There also a saying that "Anybody can build a bridge that stands up, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands up". The 2,000 year old aqueducts were massively overbuilt, not because they wanted them to stay up forever but because they didn't know how to make them stand up for 20 years without building in a factor of 100 safety margin. Our aqueducts won't last 2,000 years, but we built them for a…

Tell that to the cities who see their infrastructure fall apart after 20 years and can't finance rebuilding it stronger and cheaper.

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

#215

Post by floatboth »

payne92 wrote: post #136

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.

Put a different server in front of it instead of letting it hang on the network by itself?

I have a relatively modern LaserJet that does IPP (and Bonjour) over WiFi, but it doesn't do 5GHz WiFi, it doesn't do IPv6, so I have it plugged into a server over USB instead, and the server running CUPS exposes it on the network.

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

#216

Post by a1369209993 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #122
dimitrios1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm finding myself printing out code more and more these days, highlighting it and marking it up. There's just a different part of my brain that kicks in when I am able to get tactile with something.

I have gotten into the hobby/habit of printing at least one "thing" a day with artistic intent. That could be: * an anime character printed with a thermal receipt printer * a 4x6 card with an information graphic I rendered with CSS Grid * a shutterfly envelope to family in New England, etc. most of the time I am starting with an image somebody else made, but there is a lot of judgement involved with fitting the image…

> it's another thing to get the transfer function between "75% transparent" and a certain amount of ink into the printer's brain.

Assuming the printer has sufficient color resolution/depth, you could do gamma correction as a preprocessing step on the host computer. Still obnoxious, though.

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

#217

Post by [deleted] »

gonzo41 wrote: post #82
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…

I had a burst of creative thought, thinking about getting a typewriter and hooking up a ton of actuators to it so I could just slide it an array of a document to type out. But it'd probably move to fast or slow, jam and then there's feeding it paper. It'd probably be easier to make a nice block alphabet for a plotter and then just print your documents as biro drawings. But again, feeding paper seems like a very fiddl…

[deleted]

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

#218

Post by jancsika »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #137
jancsika wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...”

I upvoted you out of greyness because I feel like that is generally correct here. :)

Now that I've helped you out of the quicksand, let's do battle:

"[I feel like] it's not like there's some patent issue for using USB or wifi in your printer over whatever interface used in 2000 compared."

I could certainly try harder to finesse it, but I don't see any sensible place to insert a "YMMV" into any part of that sentence.

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

#219

Post by floatboth »

drewg123 wrote: post #166
pwinnski wrote: post #148

On October 23, 2012, I paid $133.76 for a "Brother HL-2270DW Compact Laser Printer with Wireless Networking and Duplex" and I have only ever used $12-15 third-party toner cartridges with it. I had to buy a replacement drum unit in 2016, that was $22.59 (third party, of course). I find it unlikely that an open-source DIY printer is going to result in something better or cheaper than what I've got.

The one thing that it would do is to eliminate the search for a well supported printer on linux, as you would know that the open source ones were well supported. The situation that always seems to happen to me is I need a printer ASAP. When shopping, I might find support for the Brother HL-2270DW in linux, but my local store might have a "Brother HL-2275DW" in stock (made up model number). So I'm wondering if the dri…

Pretty much any modern printer with a network interface supports IPP.

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

#220

Post by jfengel »

_liww wrote: post #210
jfengel wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also a saying that "Anybody can build a bridge that stands up, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands up". The 2,000 year old aqueducts were massively overbuilt, not because they wanted them to stay up forever but because they didn't know how to make them stand up for 20 years without building in a factor of 100 safety margin. Our aqueducts won't last 2,000 years, but we built them for a…

Got any evidence/examples for that, where the cost of building for 100 vs 1000 years has been worked out?

I don't; I'm just spitballing the numbers. What really happens is that they'd rather tear down a building after 100 years and build a completely different thing. Even skyscrapers generally get torn down in less than that.

There is some infrastructure (bridges, sewer systems, dams) that are supposed to last longer than that. Bridges are often torn down and replaced, and it's probably more expensive than spending twice as much and having it last five times as long (again, spitballed numbers), but that's what fits in budgets. They don't want to discover that traffic patterns have changed and they need a different bridge, or no bridge at all and have to take it down.

That's becoming a real problem for sewer systems, which in a lot of places are reaching expected lifespan, and it's going to be ludicrously expensive to replace.

Incidentally, there are also reports that the Brutalist buildings are so overbuilt that they're hard to get rid of, even when they're bad (such as having insufficient ventilation). Gigantic piles of concrete will be there in 2,000 years, whether we want them or not.

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