Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can't wrap my head around how the printer market has turned into this absolutely dispicable, foul state that it is in right now. There's no room left for innovation or competitive advantage. Its a commoditized market where they only make money when you buy their supplies so naturally they will engineer the product to work well with their supplies only. This might be an opportunity for open source printer componen…
No, you're right. There's nothing particularly magical about a printer. The PCL and Postscript specs have been in place for decades. Writing a driver to take that output and drive a print head to put it to paper should be pretty straightforward. (Needing to mark each print at the behest of the Secret Service to prevent counterfeiting is a question mark to me. Is that spec public?) It SEEMS like you could make printer…
From what I understand, once you get far enough above the SOHO market, even current printers are still that way. I suspect in the past, the small laser printer market was getting trickle-down benefits from technology innovations to service the commercial market, but now it's become its own free-standing market which no longer responds to the same signals.
It also makes me wonder if that's the road to an affordable, if overkill, printer-- a module that bypasses the scanning side of a used copier, and renders your PostScript data to it.