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Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

I think this calls for a cheap open source printer to be made. Nothing complex is needed initially, just black and white with low running costs. In reality, any liquid that stains the paper of a given consistency should be fine. It shouldn't be costing this much to replace ink.

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All you need to do is buy from a business that doesn't depend on fraud. Samsung make very nice and cheap black & white laser printers. I've bought two over the last few years, around $70. I see one on Amazon for $75 that has wifi printing as well), comes with a cartridge that lasted me 2-3 years and some thousands of pages, and replacement cartridges are $60 for branded ones, less than half that for generics. The printer is tiny, quiet, fast, etc. I can't believe people still buy anything else, after all we don't print photos at home much anymore, do we?

There are other manufacturers that do the same kind of model.

Just avoid HP and (in my experience) Canon. Laser is the way to go.

Good news! HP just bought Samsung's printer business. http://www.anandtech.com/show/10677/hp-acquire-samsung-print...

Sigh. Well, HP is doing their best to bring us into the paperless future, I suppose. Nice of them.

There is still Brother. They make nice, inexpensive black and white laser printers.

Plus they have excellent support for Linux with every single printer model - once you install their drivers.

+1 for the Brother monochrome lasers. I have two of their 2270dw printers that I bought after throwing away my three HP printers (after I couldn't make an important print out due to cartridge time-outs). Best thing I ever did. Now I'm both saving money and getting reliable prints.

Dell makes printers. Black-and-white laser printers from $100, color lasers from $200.

The cost of the ink should in theory be next to nothing. You can buy ink from our local pound shop and mess around with drilling holes in your cartridges and hoping nothing goes wrong.

A thousand pages in the UK could cost (by my estimates) about £5 to print. A cheap pack of 500 sheets is £2 and a large bottle of ink is £1.

HP buys Samsung's $1bn printer business

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37337989

Looks like Samsung won't be making "very nice and cheap black & white laser printers" for much longer.

There's also Xerox apparently, cousin got a B&W laser[1] with WiFi for 55€. Original toner is around that price, but third party toner with warranty is 20-30€.

[1] http://www.office.xerox.com/printers/laser-printers/phaser-3...

There are cheap black and white printers with very low running costs. Laser printers.

There have been attempts at open sourcing inkjet printers:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:8542 (2011)

That open source one is slow and low-res, I'm sure we can do better than that. The alternative to close-source, high-cost shouldn't be crap and slow.

You can buy separate inkjet printheads intended for industrial high-volume printing applications and build the rest from parts salvaged from other printers. Very low running cost, but also low-resolution, and those printheads are not cheap.

Alternatively, reverse-engineer existing printers to be able to use them with your own firmware that doesn't care what cartridges are in it.

Just to make sure I'm getting this right, your suggestions are to:

#1) Build your own printer.

#2) Write your own firmware.

These don't seem like good options at all unless you've got lots of time to burn on something like this.

I'm reminded of "The technology involved in making something properly invisible is so mind-bogglingly complex that 999,999,999 times out of a billion it's simpler just to take the thing away and do without it." There are things I'd like to build, but a printer is so likely to work badly that I'd probably just not print stuff instead of trying.

We need custom ROMs for printers. Like we have OpenWRT for routers.

One thing I've wondered about is why there seem to be various "hacking scenes" for other electronics like routers, game consoles, mobiles, and now even some 3D printers, but seemingly nothing for regular 2D printers; despite the fact that the hardware costs are extremely low. Given all the anti-user security those other devices have yet are bypassed by such skilled hackers, a printer may be absolutely trivial in comparison.

Perhaps people are just not so interested in printers, or the thought of getting ink and paper everywhere puts them off?

It's probably because there's no single printer model that seems worth the effort. The printer landscape is basically hundreds of shitty cheap models. New ones all the time. A moving target. The more I think about it, it's probably intentional.

I've had the same LaserJet 4000N for close to 20 years. These things were built in the late '90s (pre-shenanigans) and last. Toner changes are cheap and infrequent. Find one on eBay.

Ideally you would not want to start from scratch and instead purchase the rights to an old proven printer's design.

Anyone know of who you could approach that would sell this design to you?

Then you could probably get on Kickstarer and say "If we raise X dollars we will purchase the rights of this Y printer and open source all of the components"

Perhaps ink?

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