Inkjet printer with DRM-free ink will be launched via a crowdfunding campaign (opens in new tab)

>Also, not Open Source.

Even CC highlights this

>NC licenses do not qualify as “open licenses” under the Open Definition, and works licensed under an NC license are not considered Free Cultural Works

https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpre...

Seems like a reasonable license for someone who wants to sell their printer, but also publish the designs to allow for repair and for modifications to be shared by the community.

Well, that's unfortunate. That means another company couldn't, say, make and sell a variant of this that uses US letter sized paper instead of A4.

While I think NC is a terrible license, hasn't it been settled in court that you can hire someone to produce CC-BY-NC material? You can't run a business selling the material, but you can be hired to produce it.

I was thinking "where do I order?" but then realized it's not actual OSH (Open Source Hardware) but just a publicity stunt.

This is a textbook case where the headline should be editorialized as it contains misinformation, and many are only ever gonna read the headline.

Once, a long time ago. Richard Stallman was pissed off at an hostile printer. We got Free Software just because. Yet the printer problem remains unsolved.

I still hope somebody, somewhere, will eventually get it done and commoditize printing forever, riding us of the mafia which is printer makers.

They say:

  Built with standard mechanical components and modular parts, it’s easy to assemble, modify, and repair.

So for all those standard pieces this would not be an issue.

Lots of beneficial and spiritually open licenses are not recognized as OSS by OSI, so I wouldn't care much about what they think at this point.

In my understanding it should be fine to make parts to order and charge for that, but I may be wrong. What definitely isn’t covered is making parts in advance (anonymously) and sell them later with a profit.

I’m on the other side. My daughters print like crazy; stickers, custom doll costumes, new experiments, artworks, and then their school related stuffs. I go through the 500-pack A4 sheets in about a month or two, besides the sticker papers, photo papers.

I bought a Inkjet Brother Printer about 8+ years ago and I have refilled the ink-tank just once after the first installation. I think a full-tank last about 5 years. I’m about to add a Brother Laser Printer too.

Oh! I also print for the neighbors pretty regularly (I live in a large gated neighborhood). Their kids needs some good colorful print for school, I do it for them. I’m the guy who keeps unexpected things that comes in handy. I’m happy with that.

> I print so little these days that any inkjet printer is not cost effective due to the amount of ink it goes through to keep the heads unclogged

Few people seem to realize that ink is incredibly cheap. You just need to buy it third party. The most expensive part of an ink cartridge is the chips used to DRM them to lock you in

Same here. I bought a brother laser printer probably 10 years ago and it's been working perfectly since then. Was able to buy a pack of 3 third party toners (is that what it's called?) from Amazon few years ago and it's still going.

I feel lucky to live in SF where the library let's you print up to 20 pages per day for free. I really wonder how many people don't buy printers because of it. Then again many people can use work printers for free anyway.

Of course you could use the printer commercially. You mustn’t sell it. Using the printer is not sharing it’s design.

It's horrible and useless. An "open source" printer should allow someone to open a factory and mass produce them. I shouldn't have a dependency on the designer on something marketed as open source. That's no different than normal. You could never reasonably prevent people from making one-offs anyway, not that it's cost-efficient, or would ever be worth doing.

Attribution license it. Name it TheOpenPrinter@Patreon.com and force manufacturers to engrave it on each one. Don't pull nonsense. Crowdfunding imo sounds like they're planning to be unsuccessful at actually making them, and just to make a living off failing to make them for a year or two.

How about just getting the design tight, modular, and small-shop ready, and not even attempting to mass produce them? Leave that to the experts.

You could sell parts anyways and violate the license.

11" wide? So it'll print an 8.5x11 sideways?

I would hope that the "27mm" in the article were a typo (it would translate to 1" paper).

Edit: The project description does indeed state 27mm as one of the supported formats (A4 and A3 width are also supported). Seems an odd choice to me, but there may be a market there I don't know about.

Which sucks, that means no label printing, no envelope printing, no duplex.

90% of what I use my printer for is printing mailing labels for packages.

Canon also makes a line of printers with refillable ink tanks, no chip involved. I've owned one for a couple years now, and I helped my father set one up about three months ago. Rough back-of-the-envelope math suggests a cost of 1-2 cents per page if you're printing in color, less than that if you only print black & white. (The black ink bottle costs the same as the color bottles but is larger).

Epson also makes ink tank printers, but I don't recommend them because the Epson I used to own refused to work until the "maintenance cartridge" (a special sponge that absorbs the ink used to flush out clogs) was replaced, and it's not user-serviceable. (Technically you could do it but you'd void your warranty). So when my Epson died, I replaced it with a comparable Canon printer. Canon will sell you a maintenance cartridge for about $10 (plus tax and shipping) right on their website, and I'm sure some retailers would carry them too (though I haven't looked). I haven't needed it yet, but it's good to know I won't have to buy a new printer because I couldn't replace a simple sponge buried deep in its guts.

I wouldn't buy anything from Brother. Their website is Ugly, search has never works properly, printer is thin plastic flimsy, cartridges also thin flimsy plastic. Even downloading their software is horrible!

As long as the cartridges remain available and affordable, I don't see that much of an issue. None of the ICs in the control boards are "open source" either.

Currently, the cartridges are available and affordable - with multiple aftermarket suppliers. Some of which even split the "print head" and the "cartridge" into two separate parts, or leave ports for refilling them.

An open inkjet head would sure be fun to play around with, but it's not a hard requirement.

That sounds really useful, seems like a fun component for a DIY project if they are cheap

'lithography process' dam what is not at this point haha

Patents around printing are out of control. All the major manufacturers cross license everything from each other

Yeah if you can’t justify a >$200 inkjet, you may not need an inkjet.

Order photos from a store instead of printing them.

Get a laserjet if you just want document printing at home.

If you are doing crafts, then buy a nice inkjet. The nice inkjets pay for themselves past some volume because (1) OEM ink is actually relatively cheap and (2) they are reliable.

Why does the printer design being NC licensed mean that you won't be able to purchase one?

To me, it seems like this license makes the most sense for everyone. The designer(s) of the printer get to sell a printer that no doubt took more than a few days worth of work to go from idea to "hey look, it prints something", and everyone else gets to see how the design works, to either improve, or create a new design based on learnings from this project. Hopefully that brand new design is licensed more liberally!

But I sure as hell would love an open printer that has a less than ideal license, especially when the alternative is basically getting a new printer from one of four companies (Canon, Epson, HP... did I miss anyone?)

The world needs more open source hardware. I'm currently trying to tackle an open source washing machine and heat pump dryer in my spare time. Will it ever turn into a built project? Probably not, but I sure as hell want to make sure that every peice that I've worked on so far is released to the world if it means that the next few people can finish or fix the design.

The fact that we see __washing machines__ as something that's not worth supporting after 6 years is honestly disgusting to me. It's not a flat screen TV, I don't see the design of a washing machine improving radically in my generation.

But if it does, it should be able to be retrofitted, rather than replacing an entire machine.

In my research on tracking dots, we only ever saw them produced by laser printers (and some more obscure professional processes), not inkjet printers. It appears that the governments' pressure on printer manufacturers over this was focused on color laser printers and not color inkjets.

We have still not, as far as I know, learned what the governments threatened the manufacturers with or what they offered to them in order to get them to cooperate.

Seems like it has a cutter:

>There's an integrated cutter that'll cut the roll into A4 size, but if you have a longer format printing job like a banner, then that's possible too.

I'm reasonably sure that it's the printer that's the problem, even when dealing with ink. There have been 3rd parties that are happy to sell you the ink for forever, but the manufacturers make the printer block unofficial refills.

Nice. That one is definitely a workhorse. Dirt cheap toner, too. I began my career in IT at a small business, and I deployed one of those for a very high volume location, waaaay above its supposed lightweight duty cycle. I recall it as being incredibly fast and low-maintenance.

At home I've had 3 HP lasers in my life, all acquired for cheap or free.

A LaserJet 2100N - owned this for 10 years after getting it for free from a closing store (it was their office printer, it only perished because I did a bad job replacing the dried-out rubber rollers. Printed multiple reams of paper with it and never even replaced the toner.

A LaserJet P2055dn - like $100 shipped on ebay? owned this for about 7 years, printed at least a dozen reams. It still worked when I gave it to Goodwill to replace it with an all-in-one when an inkjet AIO we used for scanning died.

A LaserJet M227fdn - Acquired with 200 pages on it for $30 at Goodwill. No issues as I assume this will probably last a decade.

Moral of the story: Laserjets - and especially monochrome ones if that fits into your lifestyle - basically last forever and print for far less than the paper costs.

Because it’s not a printer? It’s a cartridge control module you can install on your 3d printer.

I'd love to see open-source firmware / hardware that can slot into existing inkjet or laser printers, if only to remove the tracking dots added by all printers since the mid-to-late 2000s, but also because I'm sure the hardware is more capable than the existing firmware allows.

Same thinking here. The renders look nice, but why not share a video of it working - unless it doesn't work yet...

You mean, capable of photocopying currency? The firmware could ignore the EURion Constellation and other such security patterns?

DOOM on the printer's display is a cop-out, I want my printer to be fast enough to actually print each frame fast enough to be playable.

printers can peak at over 1kW when starting printing (heat up)