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Comment by ay | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if both authors being affiliated with HP Labs is a coincidence or a sign of a conflict of interest… But the article kinda reads like a desperate last-ditch promo for the inkjets.

I haven’t had an inkjet for 30 years - only black and white lasers. Starting with HL LaserJet 5L in 2000, then Samsung and now Brother (yay for their nice platform independence so they work on Linux).

My Prusa 3D is also arguably spewing a material into a surface so I guess yeah, maybe I should count it as an inkjet as well, though ;-)

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Seems like the point of this article missed a lot of people entirely, since they are so fixated on consumer inkjet printers. That's a very specific case of inkjet printing, but inkjet technology is way more than that.

For example continuous inkjet printers are used to label packages of many items you buy every day. There's also research about inkjet printing wearable electronics etc. None of which has a lot to do with HP.

Thank you for making this point.

A lot of the comments here read like a hobbyist programmer saying “C++ is dead, I haven’t written any C++ in my projects for years and since I’ve switched to Rust, I’ve never looked back”.

Yes, I stand by this analogy because inkjet is that important. The market is doing great and technology is improving at an impressive rate.

To build on your example of continuous IJ presses: more and more applications have lately been switching to drop-on-demand, as those printheads continue to get better (especially piezo IJ) and cheaper (especially thermal IJ).

With all the anti-consumer DRM shenanigans HP is trying these days (see: Instant Ink), I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.

Ugh, yeah my household has an instant ink subscription and it’s such an obvious scam.

Since there’s no “jet” in your 3D printer from an engineering perspective, arguably you shouldn’t. That would be extrusion (and Prusa correctly refers to it as such).

“Inkjet 3D printing” exists, but it’s something quite different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_bed_and_inkjet_head_3D_...

HP Labs != HP corporate

Hp labs \subset HP corporate

Researchers have different priorities to what corporate does.

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