zlacker

>>pangor+(OP)
I worked for a while in the R&D department of HP printer division. As @jacquesm said, good 2D printer costs peanuts. The amount of R&D in color quality, speed and other parameters is huge. There were a lot of teams involved: mechanical, electrical, software, chemical... And because of that investment, there are thousands of patents that the big players are continuously paying each other for. It's a very old market with a lot of legacy. For most of us, a printer is something for home photos, some documents, and so, but that's only a little part of the cake: the money is in professional printing, ads, designers, etc.

Once that is said, it should be possible to work in a general-purpose open source 2d printer. The open community has achieved bigger goals. The biggest problem I can see is the entry barrier: to get a very basic printer, you have to invest thousands of time with a lot of knowledge in different areas, when a basic printer, even from the large companies, is not very expensive.

I think that one of the only chances we have for that to happen is that a company frees its designs and patents and community starts working from there.

>>lpfabi+C2
I had a burst of creative thought, thinking about getting a typewriter and hooking up a ton of actuators to it so I could just slide it an array of a document to type out. But it'd probably move to fast or slow, jam and then there's feeding it paper.

It'd probably be easier to make a nice block alphabet for a plotter and then just print your documents as biro drawings.

But again, feeding paper seems like a very fiddly problem.

>>gonzo4+wr
You could look into the IBM Selectric - the typing element is a ball so it can't jam, and it's actuated by little cables that might be hackable. Feed it paper off of a roll, and you have your jam-free, continuous printing solution :)

>>adyer0+Or
A few years ago I took apart my Correcting Selectric III with exactly this aim. IIRC there are around six levers which can be actuated in different combinations to select and imprint all of the symbols on the type ball. I had a lot of fun selecting them by hand to try to map all of the combinations.

IBM must have had this use in mind because they actually made a variation of the Selectric design that could be used as a serial terminal. We have one in storage at work but I think the mechanism is seized. Wikipedia has a surprisingly long section about modifying the Selectric to work as a computer terminal[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter#Use_a...