OpenPrinter
opentools.studio
opentools.studio
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.
Which is to say you can make your gaming PC at home as a one-off if you want. Though personally I won't get near the toxic chemicals used.
But really, I've given up on ink jet printers, and have gone the cheap B&W laser route for anything I need to print at home (In the past year, 2 times, a backup ticket and some paperwork that needed a real signature sent back).
But when I had them, the thing that went bad 99.999% of the time was the cartridges or a clogged nozzle on the head. So the advantage here, on the repairability side not DRM, is the rails and motors?
Also that cutter is going to be a pain, having worked on Lightjet printers, that cutter was nearly all field service issues until the FEs started leaving the "laser" key so lab managers could reset the blade themselves.
Seeing chromatic aberration on a document scan would be strange, but this is basically how many document scans are created today (using phone camera + software correction). It's just the lens effects from this cheap lens would be a lot worse than what Apple/Samsung/Google can do with their super expensive to design custom lens stacks.
They've been around long enough that you can find them all over the place used for quite cheap and they likely only need a cleaning.
I agree that the bigger challenge is going to be patents.
It also wouldn't surprise me to see HP add DRM to cartridges to authenticate the printer itself if this catches on. (Possibly requiring a printer driver/firmware update.)
Frankly, I think 99% of the reason they started integrating the print head with the cartridge was to avoid all the problems you so frequently see on printers that don’t use disposable heads.
One thing I discovered was that there's whole Chinese industries supplying this stuff in the forms of industrial printers and the application-specific cartridges they consume. And they all had one thing in common: They were based around the functionality of an HP printer cartridge. That was the universal interface.
This leads me to believe that a print cartridge format can be supported by the marketplace for a very long time whether HP likes it or not.
[1]: Printing with white is neat. It sounds impossible and there are those who say it can't happen, but it exists. It's just problematic. The head gets perma-clogged with solids within minutes of disuse in open air. So starting a print job is a race: Get everything set up, uncap the cartridge at the last moment, and then put that cap back on ASAP when the job is over.
>The head gets perma-clogged with solids within minutes of disuse in open air. So starting a print job is a race: Get everything set up, uncap the cartridge at the last moment, and then put that cap back on ASAP when the job is over
Decades ago I helped manage a local's school IT systems and we had these Epson C84 printers that used a very photo grade ink. The printheads would clog after a year of teachers printing like 1 document in that year. During that time it seemed like regular purging of ink regardless of print or not was what kept the printheads going. Strategies used by third party repair firms included submerging the head in a cleaner to dissolve the ink on the outside, connecting pipes with the same fluid to the inputs of the top to the printhead and then finally pulling pressure to try and dislodge the material through the head. Due to the non removable design of the Epson print heads, my attempts at trying this would destroy many printheads. I'd like to think this would be a solved problem in 2026. In your case why not run a purge liquid the printhead after each print? The printhead could then be primed with fresh ink each time.
We were using fixed-head printers that we found at the bottom of a deep rabbit hole. The work moved through the machine while the printy-bits remained stationary. We were doing this with HP-style monochromatic carts that came loaded with high-solids "ink" (closer to paint, really) that used opaque white pigment.
Unlike Epson's ecosystem, HP carts most-commonly come as assemblies, with a new print head included in the same disposable cartridge as the ink is. The only connection between the carts and the rest of the printer is electrical; there's no plumbing or functional fluids that are external to the carts.
This self-contained nature means that when ink runs out or heads gets clogged, replacement of everything involved with fluids is fast and easy. Production can continue immediately.
It's not problematic at all...other than being expensive. :)
Surely most/all of the patents around the actual inkjet printing function have expired though, right? I had inkjet printers in the mid 00s and if anything I feel like your average inkjet is worse these days.
It would not surprise me if something similar was happening here: HP's current cartridges have at least one piece that is under active patent protection and they don't manufacture any designs that have no patent protection. I don't know enough to state that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I would be shocked to discover that there are counterfeit print heads out there the same way there are counterfeit STM32 microcontrollers.
Unless the patents have something to do with the shape of the cartridge or they somehow have a patent on "technique to fill printer cartridge with ink" which would not be so surprising.
The photos clearly show HP cartridges installed.
Many corporate and government types, especially lawyers, want control. They will go broke trying to control everyone and everything.
It just seems easier to fire off a cease and desist than to take a risk of other people messing around with your ecosystem.
This already happens for basically every commercially-available ink cartridge.
Heck, it may actually save them money. At one point they were losing money on every printer sale and making it back in ink No idea if that’s still the case.
It's also been widely held that ink cartridge compatibility tools/hacks are allowed under DMCA.
However, it does seem likely that there's probably some shenanigan involved in the area - one example I could think of would be if HP have patented the way the ink cartridges are retained in the printer, for example, that would have to be carefully audited. And there will be license and trade secrets issues with the use of the cartridges, although if they were reverse engineered cleanly and the printer doesn't come with cartridges, those are probably pretty easily side-stepped.
I could totally imagine a rapid upheaval of the patent system as soon as we see it being used against us.
Any patents are probably expired or very close to it.
Instead they use the fact mosfet gates have capacitance, and can therefore store 1 'bit' of information. Through a network of hundreds of MOSFETs, the right bits can be put on all the nozzle gates as needed, and then a 'fire' pulse is sent which for around a microsecond turns on a tiny heater (or not, depending on mosfet gate state). The heater boils some ink, making a pressure wave which travels down a pipe and makes a drop of ink fly out towards the paper. That heating and cooling again can happen around 10,000 times per second per nozzle (and there are ~300 nozzles).
I suspect this decision is because the custom silicon process needed to manufacture these nozzles is cheaper if they only have n type MOSFETs - and without p type MOSFETs you can't make a typical push pull logic gate.
The nozzles themselves are quite a lot of silicon - perhaps 100mm^2, with deep etched holes, and are effectively disposable, so I assume huge efforts have been taken to reduce costs - including this curious electrical design.
The protocol also is hugely irregular, which I suspect might be to avoid any wires on the chip needing to cross eachother.
Compatible cartridges
HP 63 and HP 63 XL (US)
HP 302 and HP 302 XL (Europe)
HP 803 and HP 803 XL (Asia)
You're saying this as if it is a bad thing? I absolutely welcome this decision by the authors!
But how important?
Imagine someone saying the same thing about MongoDB's license, for example.
If you can't legally use the product, the fact that the source is available is meaningless. CC-NC is a source available license, not an open source license.
If we have a common design them surely we want people to be able to build their own, or buy a prebuilt?
If it is a noncommercial licence then it removes the other option to set up a business selling these pre-built. Not everyone wants to build a printer.
> NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
I mean, the licence says that I can't...
But maybe I'm emotional, as that company has been taking premium for a broken experience of so many people I know. I didn't expect such project going for their equipment.
Still not worth it. My Brother is hitting 10 years now, and I'm trying to think of many scenarios where I really needed to print colour at home.
I switched to laser because I only print like maybe once a month on average (but when I need it, I need it). I'm not the slightest bit worried about the delta energy usage between my laser printer or the inkjet, and I'm sure the inkjet came out worse given the number of cartridges I had to throw away or paper I wasted printing diagnostics.
Even if you can afford a color laser, the problem is a color MFP (ie including a scanner) occupies a lot more space compared to a equivalent inkjet, and for some people this could be a deal breaker.
all printers are the size of microwave. Inkjets aren't any smaller
> MFPs with ADFs to be exact
at that point you're talking about a full-on office appliance and far above DIY repair scale the discussion is about
Of course I have no way of verifying either way. Still I do think the project looks quite interesting, I'm in the market for a printer and this is certainly the most interesting one I've seen in a while.
A lot of car shops with regular 100% humidity conditions will swear by dot matrix + tractor for feeding paper + printing. Plus, the carbon copy forms are guaranteed to be exact carbon copies which also leads to legal guarantees about copies of paper being provably exactly the same in the court of law.
They're noisier than ink printers, but non-industrial quality can be pretty reasonable for office-level noises.
Quality certainly isn't on par with laser printers, but for text (both Latin and CJK), it's perfectly clear.
Did you mean the late 80s'? Growing up we had a Panasonic dot matrix printer from the mid to late 80s that had no trouble with A4 paper.
A Matrix printer is essentially a typewriter with extra steps and typewriters had been eating any paper for .. a century before?
If the Chinese, who are known for being able to make knockoffs of everything are not able to make inkjet printers, this should tell you how hard it is.
It addition to the print head, reliable paper transport is also really hard. That problem is often sidestepped by using a paper roll or by printing one sheet at a time, as it is the case for the Openprinter.
Per Google, most HP printers are made in China.
A more likely explanation has to do with the economics of ink jet printers. The ink sales are so profitable that HP and other manufacturers subsidize their printers. This leads to prices at or near cost.
Since Ali express vendors can't count on follow on ink sales, they can't compete on price. And competing on price is Ali express's reason for existence.
So, ink jet printer are harder to find on Ali express. At least, low end consumer focused ink jet printers.
Laser printers, which aren't subsidized are common
https://www.delioa.com/products/a4-inkjet-printer/
ZoneWin, a laser printer company, made a clone of both HP LaserJet 1020 and LaserJet M1005, which reuse most of the original/compatible parts (Q2612A cartridge). They claim it's 100% domestic parts only.
https://www.rtmworld.com/news/new-chinese-made-printer-uses-...
There's at least one project that has tried to design an actual DIY/open-source inkjet printer [0], along with inkjet print heads [1].
The ink most likely need some special sauce? But I imagine there's many organizations that can specialize in making the ink so that it can be treated close to a commodity. If not, maybe this can also be engineered?
They do claim that this printer will print in black when the colour cartridge is empty, which they imply is not possible with common printers. The only time I ever encountered that I simply removed the colour cartridge and the printer was happy to print in black.
The paper path itself is mechanically involved, but not to an impossible degree - it's hard to make it work, but it's not MEMS magic, it's manufacturable in the same way advanced 3D printers are manufacturable.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XB7iAFXCJQM&t=17s&pp=2AERkAIB
Sure it could be fraud but it could also just work.
The rest of a printer aren't too hard to design and make, especially if you don't have super tight budget constraints.
Out of ignorance, I wonder how IPR will work with interoperability rights. Patent rights seem like they might not be exhausted when you buy a spare part to use in third-party device, vs when you buy a spare part for an OEM device.
I'm guessing all the tech here has aged out of patent protection though?
I like the wall mounted example with the output paper holder below. Neat.
Saying "no way you will succeed, is way too difficult! look how hard is it for HP" is absolute non-sense.
Also, if the whole printing head is from HP, and they sell it for the price they do, I do not think is the most advanced science the mankind achieved. I would have such doubt maybe if somebody wants to compete with ASML. But Inkjet? really? such an old technology with all patents expired?
[0] https://www.weizmann.ac.il/WeizmannCompass/sections/features...
I would believe most relevant patents are now expired and that we should be able to build a printer that at least gives sufficient quality prints. Given sufficient motivation and time investment, that is.
Is robustness and reparability a compelling pitch? If I'm counting right, I owned eight different printers in my life. Dot matrix, dye sublimation, inkjet, laser. I don't think a single one ever required any serious repairs beyond replacing consumables, clearing paper jams, and pulling out lint. I upgraded as the technology improved. My first laser printer needed about 4x as much desk space as the current one.
I think your experience has been an outlier. I've had several printers from different brands also, and have had some that last a long time, and still print with decent quality even with off-brand ink/toner. However, quite a lot have also failed due to bad capacitors, bad power modules, or the printer or it's firmware just refused to work/print for whatever reason and the manufacturer response was: "buy a new one." There's definitely planned obsolescence built into these machines, and that's why people dislike them, aside from the fact they can be a pain to configure. That's in addition to the ink DRM and other shitty cartel like bs from printer manufacturers.
I've since switched to a Brother LaserJet and I'm still on the starter toner after a couple of years.
Laser toner can sit unused without drying out (it's dry powder already).
My mom wanted a printer for her birthday and it's been a few months without any success when it comes to selecting the right model
If she wants to print color photographs regularly and absolutely doesn't want to wait for them, then: Some manner of inkjet. Brother inkjets take care of themselves (as long as they're powered up) with a ~daily automated song-and-dance to help avoid the head-clogging issue that many other inkjets face, but even then it's a more fickle technology than laser printing is.
It's also important to compare the price/convenience of printing photos at home to having someone else do it. Buying high-quality prints (whether from online services that deliver by mail or from the local pharmacy or big box) can be cheaper and better quality than doing it at home, and make maintaining the printing machine someone else's problem.
(edit- I unintentionally left it to implication, but: If she wants to print color photographs only once or twice per year, then... she's probably way, way better off by not doing that at home. At all.)
Like the other commenter mentioned, I think your experience is likely an outlier. But more to the point, the way printer companies make money (lose money on the printer, make it up on ink), the couple times my printer has broken, I just bought a brand new printer. I'm sure the printer probably could have been easily fixed but it wasn't even like that was a decent option.
This printer probably isn't for everyone but there are enough of us who are so fed up with "subscription fatigue" and locked down devices that having a tool that I fully own and could fix if necessary is appealing.
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...
A few other comments have concentrated on the printer head and ink cartridge, but the roll vs sheets interests me. Manipulating sheets of paper is actually quite a difficult problem to solve - and there is only a demonstration of paper placement. Loading page after page is actually really not easy at all. There is no example of it printing.
I see they got a nomination for a design award [1], which in my personal experience has been a negative signal for successful projects. On the same page they mention that they also mention that they don't even know how much this will cost yet:
> We know this is your most frequently asked question! Final pricing depends on a moving puzzle of production volumes, BoM costs, industrialization expenses, regulatory certifications, and final engineering developments.
On the crowd funding page it mentions for parts [2]:
> Main board: Raspberry Pi Zero W
> Cartridge board: STM32 MCU
Not a specific MCU variant, and the specifics of the Pi variant (i.e. RAM) are not mentioned. I would expect these parts would be locked in by now. I have a feeling that this is not quite as ready as made out - I think there is still R&D going on.
[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer/updates/...
I agree with the rest but Pi Zero W is a specific machine with 512 MB RAM:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/
It's also the one everyone can buy online for $19, not Pi Zero 2 W (always out of stock)
I thought they came in different variants - my meat-based LLM must have hallucinated it.
> It's also the one everyone can buy online for $19, not Pi Zero 2 W (always out of stock)
I get the impression that they don't actively manufacture Pi Zero W anymore and it's all old stock. Rapid for example say they have an availability of 761 (at time of writing) [1], but are those all within Rapid's control, or what is reported at Raspberry Pi's remaining stock? If you sell 1k printer units, can you put a Pi Zero W in all of them?
Compute modules are probably a bit more reliable and there is some capability with other modules, specifically the DDR2 form factor ones [2] (which is my favorite form factor). For example, ClockWork sold their own compatible compute modules [3].
[1] https://www.rapidonline.com/raspberry-pi-sc0020-zero-w-singl...
[2] https://www.rapidonline.com/raspberry-pi-compute-module-cm3-...
[1] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/making-a-label-printer-wo...
> 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.
The license applies to the thing, not the thing you print using the thing. Me writing software or prose on a computer running Linux using a GPL editor wouldn't change that the copyright of what I write belongs to me, the author.
You can't make a commercial competitor of this printer using their design, but using the printer for its intended purpose (printing) is obviously unrelated to that.
Which means it's not open source. Open source means you have the right to distribute work however you want, including commercially, provided you also provide the source under the same license terms as the original.
The second you slap a non-commercial limitation on there, it ceases to be open source.
The existence of a service manual doesn't mean you can get parts once the company disappears or loses interest.
(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.
What's there to handle? They just don't include them and there's no statute that requires them to.
Counterfeiting was a big worry as high-resolution color printers became cheap. They did it motu proprio just like today ~all AI gen services watermark their outputs.
The printer surveillance is my main draw to this project. EFF basically came to the conclusion that all Western printers likely have some sort of surveillance like that. I've confirmed with them on the Discord that they are not required to implement any such surveillance
> Open Printer is distributed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
The non-commercial clause makes it non-open by the commonly accepted term of "open" in this context.
So not open source.
Are you miffed by the restriction on you selling derivative open printers?
[0] https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...
As long as softwsre isn't going to be proprietary, it is a good idea just shouldn't misguide about being open source.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer
> Open Source
> Open Printer will use the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license for all of its files, including electronics and mechanical design files, firmware code, and the bill of materials.
Calling CC-BY-NC "Open Source" is a blatant lie.
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?
I see the same people have been in charge of product design and marketing at Brother for the last twenty years...
I did initially run into clogged heads too, until I scheduled a test print every month which uses all colors. That way no single color stays unused for too long, and it's been working like a charm ever since.
If the heads are already "degraded" there are two (or more?) cleaning programs available from within the official printer driver settings dialog. They did resolve my initial issues.
Epson could definitely do a better job of informing users though by slapping a big warning on the thing saying "you need to print something every X days to avoid issues".
Ditched Epson for Canon. I've had my Canon ink-tank printer for a couple years now. Had ONE serious clog that required multiple flushes to clear the clog, but mostly it's been clog-free. But the best part is that I can just order a new maintenance cartridge from Canon for about $12 + shipping. So when it fills up (probably in another couple years) I can just swap it out myself and keep on printing.
Won't ever buy another Epson printer again. Canon has been great so far.
Non commercial licences are not open source. https://community.oscedays.org/t/why-are-non-commercial-lice...
I use Brother black and white laser printer with after market toner cartridges from eBay .
Print around 200 pages a day.
Around 5000 pages for 37 AUD ie around 25 USD.
The paper costs more per page than the toner.
Just make sure you stay away from HP branded printers...
They are fine for documents but if you want details photo printing then inkjet I think has an edge, but for most people laser is better choice.
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.
---
(*) - except perhaps for the NC restriction in the license.
Honestly I'm torn on this one. I will probably buy it but from a purely philosophical standpoint. Why? Well I do have a black & white HP laser printer that I've been using with my Linux devices for years now. It just works. There are a lot of terrible printers out there with wacky firmwares pinging home to their manufacturers. Some require ink with DRM, some companion apps, etc.
But... and that's my main point, are just basic printers that work anywhere with anything. There are quite a few to the point that among peripheral printers might be one of the safest one can safely "yeah it will probably work with open system no problem" relatively confidently (still do check first).
So... yeah it's cool but in terms of openness of our entire IT ecosystem printing doesn't appear to me as the priority gap to fill.
Cool project anyway!
I haven't experienced the odor of ozone when printing at home since my HP Laserjet 4 died from water damage 18 years ago.
My current Brother laser printer (an MFC-2750DW, IIRC) is so non-stinky that I haven't thought about for a very long time.
Very few domestic / small office printers will ever hit that number, but for a ~20 year old model, it's possible yours has. The service manual suggests it's rated for 50,000 pages (as are the drum and roller), but unfortunately isn't replaceable.
Time for a new model?
(The canonical print shop smell is ozone - imagesetters produced way more than a laser printer - together with solvent from the inks and lots and lots of stale coffee. Possibly mixed with cigarette smoke, depending on just how long ago you're talking about...)
> A patent as well as a design and model registration have been made to protect the technical architecture and design of Openprinter.
So, open as in OpenAI.
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.
Of course the details of what specific parts are purchaseable on the open market can and will change this calculus a lot.
I wonder why. Were the consumables too cheap and the printers too reliable to be commercially viable? Did color laser printers catch up in terms of print quality? Did it have some other fatal flaw?
- A single ink clog can destroy a printhead.
- partial clogs can result in ugly messes with ink smeared all over the pages and the assembly further smearing on later prints.
- the printer has to be calibrated to the specific formulation of solid ink to work properly. A bad ink batch or calibrating to the wrong formulation (or a drift in specs on the formulation) can cause clogs, print head failures, etc.
- solid ink printing massively complicates lamination if that's something you need to do (ex in an office).
Overall it's a far more unforgiving process. You can't really have aftermarket inks like you can with modern inks and even variations in the first party manufacturing process can have catastrophic effects on the print hardware.
I only used one for a few years, and never thought to laminate the pages because they didn't need it -- dye-sub wax-printed pages were already suitable for outdoor maps because the wax repelled water, and they held up where inkjet pages became a smeary mess immediately.
We definitely did wash our hands before and after loading ink blocks, I remember being cautioned about that.
Oh well. I guess my memories are better than the tech deserved. Won't be the last time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
Every manufacturer volunteered to rob their own customers of anonymity. Even at the OS and application level (Adobe) people are being tagged with robust watermarks. In general, still no one cares. =3
It is also common for people to create urban legends rather than discuss how to actually fix legal policy failures. As previously stated, consumers implicitly gave permission though sustained inaction on industry volunteering to help track customers.
An OSS printer would be cool from a standards/driver perspective, but microfluidics are a nontrivial technology. Bloomberg also paid lobbyists >$23m to try to mandate "AI" R.A.T. installation (company associated with Palantir) on 3D printers to attempt convincing criminals to care about laws again.
It is unclear if such action is consistent with constitutional legal precedents, but it is certainly hilarious to see kids figure out the mess a prior generation creates. Best of luck, =3
The continuous feed is nice though... I can see this used for banners like in the old sheet fed dot-matrix days... Print Shop Pro FTW!
- By rolling the paper, will it really stay flat after printing? - How easy / cheap will sourcing ink be?
It would be a lot more aspirational to figure out how to build a tank-based printer (although maybe its not possible to compete with the incumbents on price in this space)
In theory you could probably modify one of these by grabbing an HP cartridge and slapping an ink tank on top with the right sponge for transferring the ink over. Selling parts from HP printer cartridges might creep a little too close to HP's patent lawyers, though, and having users open cartridges to extract the print heads themselves sounds like a messy solution that would reduce the appeal.
I'm sure that given time, someone will 3D print an ink tank holder that will let you use cheap ink supplies through the expensive HP cartridges.
Yes, but it also means it won't be cheaper or more reliable than a regular printer. The print head is what fails most often and you'll still have to buy a new one.
Also, the bottom spinning button CTA doesn't read like a CTA to me. My skimming eyes almost missed, but YMMV.
Other than that - awesome project and godspeed OpenPrinter team!
Some previous discussion on the crowdfunding:
Inkjet printer with DRM-free ink will be launched via a crowdfunding campaign (2025)
What's even the point of this landing page in this state?
The number of steps here is enough that you could rule out everything. And anything you think is left is just something you aren’t aware of a chain that links them.
HP could stop selling ink cartridges to stores, but they'd be shooting themselves in the foot as well.
Open source AI without a source. Open source software, oh but only up to 4000 users after two years of release for people on south hemisphere. Now open source hardware but your copies of design are for noncommercial use, only our copies are not restriced.
https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/printers/#Cheap%20used%20laser...
* How can it can do 2-side printing ? (on a normal printer, you may print all the odd pages, turn the whole thing, and print all the even pages)
* Won't the cutter experience some wear ?
Also, if you wanted to avoid yellow dots, not sure if this is built into the cartridge or the firmware of the rest of the printer.
Now, I understand that would be hard to pull off. Maybe one could build a deskjet500 equivalent one.
Laser printers are quite complex as well, you need too many non-easy to build from scratch parts.
Maybe a dot matrix printer is possible.
I know for sure you can retrofit older electric typewriters, and those are pretty repairable.
But the heads being disposable and one day unavailable is kind of a valid concern if a new source doesn't eventually turn up.
It looks like they're using the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license so restricting commercial use which I think would run afoul of the purists definition of Freedom?
It's a cool printer, and I'd much rather have something like this!
s/Reparaible/Repairable
Perhaps because it's irrelevant [0].
>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.