Interesting 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 a pre-crowdfund landing page without a demonstrating a working prototype. I would like to be wrong, but I expect you to be waiting a long time. An inkjet printer is not a collection of off the shelf parts. It is a machine that operates at the edge of chemistry, fluid dynamics, and electro-mechanical design...you have to place tiny tiny drops of liquid ink on commodity wood pulp with precision under arbitrary environmental conditions, get that ink to dry on the wood pulp, but not in tank or nozzel, while producing acceptable color, durability, and ease of use. Also lawyers...there are patents.

This is interesting, but it seems to be a crowdfunding campaign only. I wish them the best of luck (the cause is worthy for sure), but buyer beware at this point.

(I myself don't 2D print enough that an ink based printer makes sense for me. Ink tends to dry, so for me a laser printer that can sit for months at a time makes more sense. I use the scanner as well as my 3D printer far more often.)

I wonder how they will handle the nonsense around yellow tracking dots[1] etc. Hopefully that doesn't become a problem.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

Unless I'm missing something using this in a commercial application would be a license violation:

> Open Printer is distributed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

> This means that everyone is free to use, share, and modify the project, provided they credit the original author, share derivatives under the same license, and do not use it for commercial purposes.

It's also not opensource yet, there's a vague mention of "when its ready" it'll be released.

just in time. this will certainly juice development of the equally important open source fax machine.

> Open Printer is distributed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

So not open source.

I 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 reliability?

Image loading is too fancy and went on a lunch break I think.

I 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.

I really love the idea of a paper roll rather than individual sheets. Being able to print out to the size you want rather than only in pre-set sizes is quite cool.

I want to buy one of these just to support projects like it.

Would be interested in others take on this. Personally, I wonder:

- By rolling the paper, will it really stay flat after printing? - How easy / cheap will sourcing ink be?

how has no on mentioned the typo in the title

s/Reparaible/Repairable

Isn't the paper feed the hardest part - the part that always gets jammed? I swear a paper roll is cheating.

Been waiting for framework to make a regular 2D printer, of any kind, would buy at least two instantly. I will never, never, never buy a fing printer from hp/canon/epson/brother/etc with anti-consumer tech, I rather die.

LASER

Richard they did it. You can rest now.

Title Typo? Reparaible to Repairable?

How do they get a satan inside it, i thought demons were proprietary.

This is just the thing I needed 30 years ago :-(

To be less facetious though, this seems like a nice project (*), but I print so much less these days than in the past. I printed a lot of color stuff when I was in school; but these days I just settle for black/halftoning from a laser printer, for when I actually need something printed, and color on screen only.

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(*) - except perhaps for the NC restriction in the license.

It's such a good idea as a project and by the looks of things well executed. I also feel the style of the printer and the fact it can be a roll of paper will lead to interesting project ideas.

I mean it’s about time a company makes a repairable and pro consumer printer. My god

Please "repair" the title, maybe include OpenPrinter to start with, or solely.

Some previous discussion on the crowdfunding:

Inkjet printer with DRM-free ink will be launched via a crowdfunding campaign (2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45423404

Can we expect photos to be looking nice?