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.
Shouldn't anything relevant have expired years ago? The first laserjet came out in 1984 it seems. Prices have come down, but I haven't seen any real innovation in printers (not that I really need any- I just want them to print)- since 2000.
The business printers in 2000 had slow processors and more ram. It was significantly bad that printing PDFs spent more time processing the file than putting toner on page.
Finally, the interfacing for printers today is fantastic. I know this isn’t about toner on page, but having wifi connection, an LCD touchscreen interface, and them generally being a little smaller has made the experience better.
The only thing that was better about printing in 2000 is that back then printing was more useful because so many people wanted paper copies.
Yes I do. No there were no "literally every printer was suffering".
1995-2000 was a perfectly fine era of B&W desktop laser printing (others can chime in about how it was before 1995). Go get some computer history education, or ask an adult in the room.
Ok, I don't know what PC stands for, but load letter means you're out of paper, please fill me up. It's not a blinking clock on a VCR.
PC: "Paper Cassette" Load: "out of paper, please load more" Letter: "US Letter size (8.5"x11")"
In some offices you'd be equally likely to see similar codes like "PC LOAD A4" or "PC LOAD LEGAL".
The LaserJet Series II and III didn't have paper drawers, but rather paper cassettes, which you could load with a stack of paper (maybe a few hundred sheets? less than half a ream IIRC), and then swap in and out of the machine as a unit.
Some models (I think it might have been an add-on peripheral for the Series II?) had two cassette slots, so you could load two supplies of paper at the same time. Either you could load the same size twice, in which case it would perform like a backup: if you ran out of paper in the first cassette, it would switch to the second cassette automatically but start flashing a light to tell you that it was time to reload the first one. Or you could load two different sizes, and it would select the right cassette to draw from based on the size of the document being printed.
The Series II didn't have a way to measure the size of the paper, so each cassette was designed for only one paper size. There was an interface where the cassette plugged into the printer which indicated which size paper it contained.
Due to the design of the paper cassette, it was very hard to tell from the outside how much paper was left. There was a tiny window but it was nearly opaque. IIRC later versions of the cassette improved this.
So if you had a model with only one cassette (which was fairly common, I think) and you loaded a "US Letter" size cassette, and it ran out of paper, the printer would refuse to print anymore until you gave it more paper. In the meantime the tiny LCD screen would flash "PC LOAD LETTER".
The printer was a workhorse and I can testify that many offices in my area were using 1980s-era Series II printers daily in 1999, when I had a part-time IT job that among other things involved doing maintenance on said printers. Replacing the rubber paper pickup roller and clearing paper jams out of the fusing unit were probably the two most common trouble cases, IIRC.