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
> the money is in professional printing, ads, designers, etc.

And ink cartridges

>>_def+Ok
Ink cartridges is only a $1B global industry [0]. That isn’t a small market, but the global printing industry, with all digital content being transferred onto any 2d mediums through automatic means is probably closer to $1T. Think about every book, every magazine, every coffee mug with a funny saying, every graphic TShirt. In the world.

The ink cartridges are good money, but it’s not where the money is at.

[0] https://www.rfdtv.com/story/42630937/global-ink-cartridges-m...

>>Nbox9+Cu
It's not the main source of revenue, but for personal printing most of the money comes from selling ink cartridges. My dad used to work for a printer company and he said that on personal printer sales they usually broke even or sometimes sold at a loss. But all of that was made up with the profit margin on ink cartridge sales.