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
That model is juuuuuust about dead. Canon/Lexmark/HP are now all pushing megatank/ecotank continuous ink systems. I bought a Canon Pixma G6020 for printing photos and I'm super pleased with it. It comes with enough ink to do 18,000 black and white pages and 6000 full color pages. Refills are around $40 for the set.

>>shiftp+Qz
How is that worth it for them? I pay $40 for a cartridge of about 1/10th the capacity, and the printer isn't even that expensive!

Although I bet I still have to send my document to it six times before it starts printing.