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
> feeding paper ... fiddly

Printer paper came in long, laser-perforated sheets with tabs. You'd load in the start and one sheet pulls in the next.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_stationery

The crank you had to put into the front of the printer to get the steam-powered engine turning could jam in the transmission, though, and you had to watch the temperature of your coal-fired ink tank so it didn't over-boil. Those "electronic" printer guys thought they were so fancy.