Freaking awesome start! I will revisit this when it gets to laser printing.
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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0 chance for DIY laser from scratch. 0 Chance for LED without someone's printhead.
Those printers contain a lot of high-precision custom stuff that you can't replicate without a substantial lab.
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"Open Printer will use the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 [Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike] license for all of its files,"
That isn't an open source licence....
While the firmware could be using a classic software license, in the hardware world these licenses don't mean much. Afaik Creative Commons licenses are what's generally used for open hardware
Non commercial means nobody else can sell it, so even if you print one for a friend you can't legally recoup the costs from them
This would be allowed from my understanding of the license. You are not gaining commercial advantage or monetary compensation from "selling" it at cost to your friend once
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So your friend buys all the components and a case of beer (or non alcoholic equivalent) and asks you to help assemble it?
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Unless this thing forgoes that stupid print code that puts yellow dots on each page to identify you when you print stuff like every other printer out there, it isn't worth the hassle.
It's open source. So even if it had it you could remove it.
What's this? I've never seen yellow dots on stuff I print
Edit: looked it up, intresting and definitely a bit disturbing from a privacy perspective. Particularly that it was kept secret until 2004.
theyre microscopic. theyre typically used to track printers doing illegal stuff (e.g counterfeiting) and leak tracking if someone when to scan some document and post it somewhere it shouldnt be. Of course, this is antithetical to privacy. The yellow dots are microscopic throughout the page.
You can’t. They’re microscopic.
It's only common on color laser printers.
actually that's only for laser printers - inkjets don't have tracking dots
This isn’t entirely correct.
https://office-watch.com/2017/secret-printer-tracking-dots/
Generally they are not found in lower end budget inkjets, but are found in higher end ones.
Reliance on the HP cartridges maybe a mistake as HP wants to cut 3rd parties out and sell direct to customers via subscription.
Third-party cartridges will continue to be available. HP printers they are compatible with are expected to last decades because that's how long most of them make HP money.
This is so awesome!
Now make that with a continuous ink system.
I once worked at a place with a fancy printer that didn't use cartridges and instead used blocks of wax that could be continually fed into it. It took 20 minutes to start up and warm the wax up to the point it could be used as ink, but I thought it was a nifty idea. They're called solid ink printers if you're interested in looking them up.
So... Basically the same principle as 3d printing (melt the printing medium, send it through an extruding head that directs it onto a surface in a desired pattern), but just in 2 dimensions, and with a different printing medium? Neat.
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Have the patents expired? I'd assume InkJet is older than 2005
I love this! If its reasonably priced I'd go for one.
I'm wondering about the price too. Feel like we see someone trying to do this every few years and most of them tend to fall apart when someone figures out how much it will cost to do it effectively.
This one seem to have kept it very simple though. Not exactly a new idea but simplifying paper feed with the continuous roll & cutter idea might be genius.
Inkjet
No thanks
I can see by down votes not a popular opinion, but I'd pay over $1k for an open source laser printer with Brother's reliability.
I'm all for open source laser, and lasers are great for some things, but they're trash for photo printing for instance. Inkjets are brilliant for lots of stuff.
Unless you're a professional printing hundreds of photos and buy the proper industrial printer, it's always cheaper to take your photos to a store and have them printed there than deal with your own inkjet. Budget inkjets are a waste, through and through.
Or sometimes it's nice to have a good inkjet so you can print stuff on a whim, or tweak the colours if they don't turn out right. You can pick up a good inkjet for well under £500, it's not outrageous for a hobby. Regardless, inkjets have their place.
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I just bought my parents a Brother HLL3280CDW color laser printer and printed some pretty colorful graphics and omg the color quality was straight up tra—fine actually, good actually?
I was pretty surprised because I tend to see posts talk about how horrible laser color printers are and my experience seems to be exactly the opposite. At least on this Brother printer, printing big color charts, graphics, with full color backgrounds and patterns, seems great. I can't tell the difference between laser and inkjet.
they’re trash for photo printing
I haven't tried this yet, but maybe one of these days I'll buy some glossy photo paper and try printing photos. I'll have to report back.
They're fine for charts and graphics, but they're going to lack depth and vibrancy on photos. It is what it is, I'm absolutely not dissing laser printers they're great, inkjets are just better for that job.
That rules. I wonder what the print speed it, and if they'll be a way to use toner carts
Not a super complicated device, but toner would be a very different tech stack, probably not.