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
bit of a non-argument this. Existence of cheap alternatives misses the point of opensource, its not about cost. ref: free as in beer vs free as in speech.

>>teknop+48
I think you're missing the main argument: It would take a lot of money and cross-domain knowledge to design and build a passable printer from scratch. Contrast that with software, where all you need is time and a low to medium power computer. In fact, compared to software open source, all other open source engineering is non-existent (relative to OSS, not in absolute terms).

>>adwn+ri
Why would you design one from scratch? The hardware out there is excellent and inexpensive. Start with that and write the firmware in a similar way that the Magic Lantern group did for cameras.

>>cridde+Au
> Why would you design one from scratch? The hardware out there is excellent and inexpensive.

I thought the discussion was about open source printers, not about open source printer firmware? Sure, you could probably reverse engineer the interface to the actuators and sensors, which would allow you to write open source drivers, but you'd still be stuck with the printer manufacturer's cartridges.