How do they get a satan inside it, i thought demons were proprietary.
OpenPrinter
51–60 of 299 posts
Re: OpenPrinter
#52how has no on mentioned the typo in the title
s/Reparaible/Repairable
Re: OpenPrinter
#53I talked a bit about this years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37007815 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.
There are still quality laser printers on the market without extortion and surveillance built-in, unlike inkjets. The need for an open laser printer is less dire than for an open inkjet.
And not a single solid-ink-onto-paper sublimation printer, that I'm aware. There are badge printers still using a dye-sub ribbon, but the Tektronix Phaser, later the Xerox Phaser, is completely gone.
I wonder why. Were the consumables too cheap and the printers too reliable to be commercially viable? Did color laser printers catch up in terms of print quality? Did it have some other fatal flaw?
Re: OpenPrinter
#54Interesting comment from last time this was posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48093670 Inkjet 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…
isn't inkjet an outdated tech by now?
How so?
Re: OpenPrinter
#55Interesting comment from last time this was posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48093670 Inkjet 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…
I have enormous respect for dot matrix printers. They're easy to repair and service, the tech is relatively simple, it's cheap, it's parts are cheap, its supplies are cheap. It's way more sustainable than any other printer: both the printer itself in its manufacturing and the ribbons themselves. The waste they produce is also much less polluting than any other printer.
Re: OpenPrinter
#56I had an Epson Ecotank for a couple of years. The printer heads got clogged all the time. We bought a series of cleaning products to address it, they often solved the problem for only a few prints. We finally gave up and bought a Brother laser printer. 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 reliabil…
Just bought a Brother ink tank printer (they have a whole line). Let's see how long it lasts.
Thirteen models that all look nearly identical and a website that doesn't even remotely help you distinguish between them.
I see the same people have been in charge of product design and marketing at Brother for the last twenty years...
Re: OpenPrinter
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are still quality laser printers on the market without extortion and surveillance built-in, unlike inkjets. The need for an open laser printer is less dire than for an open inkjet.
And not a single solid-ink-onto-paper sublimation printer, that I'm aware. There are badge printers still using a dye-sub ribbon, but the Tektronix Phaser, later the Xerox Phaser, is completely gone. I wonder why. Were the consumables too cheap and the printers too reliable to be commercially viable? Did color laser printers catch up in terms of print quality? Did it have some other fatal flaw?
Hot melt ink/solid ink has a laundry list of problems that complicate it.
- A single ink clog can destroy a printhead.
- partial clogs can result in ugly messes with ink smeared all over the pages and the assembly further smearing on later prints.
- the printer has to be calibrated to the specific formulation of solid ink to work properly. A bad ink batch or calibrating to the wrong formulation (or a drift in specs on the formulation) can cause clogs, print head failures, etc.
- solid ink printing massively complicates lamination if that's something you need to do (ex in an office).
Overall it's a far more unforgiving process. You can't really have aftermarket inks like you can with modern inks and even variations in the first party manufacturing process can have catastrophic effects on the print hardware.
Re: OpenPrinter
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
The required super wide field of view for the camera could be tricky, without making the box really deep. Or am I not thinking about it right?
You'd probably need some basic custom lens (not crazy $$) that would distort the heck out of the image, but you could correct the shape in software. Given that GP wanted this to be the "low quality / high speed" secondary scanning option, the inevitable loss of quality would be acceptable. Seeing chromatic aberration on a document scan would be strange, but this is basically how many document scans are created today…
That's pointless when ADF scanners will do a dual-side scan, at around 2-3 seconds per page, and more importantly, can do so with a stack of pages.
They've been around long enough that you can find them all over the place used for quite cheap and they likely only need a cleaning.
Re: OpenPrinter
#59Interesting comment from last time this was posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48093670 Inkjet 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…
The second part is verbose but say absolutely nothing of the difficulty and issues. It could be applied to anything, even cooking a steak
Re: OpenPrinter
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about that license makes you think you can't use the device (i.e. print things) for commercial purposes? The license applies to the thing, not the thing you print using the thing. Me writing software or prose on a computer running Linux using a GPL editor wouldn't change that the copyright of what I write belongs to me, the author. You can't make a commercial competitor of this printer using their design, but us…
> You can't make a commercial competitor of this printer using their design Which means it's not open source. Open source means you have the right to distribute work however you want, including commercially, provided you also provide the source under the same license terms as the original. The second you slap a non-commercial limitation on there, it ceases to be open source.
Of course it's not open source, there's no source to even be open or closed yet! It is Creative Commons, though, which is different.