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
What kind of patents? I had tank of an HP laserjet 3 in the 90s, and patent life is 20 years. For the basic functionality, they should all be expired at this point, and the limiting factor at the time was the high cost of memory and compute.

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.

>>kevste+8s
Do you remember printing in 2000? Literally every printer was suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions. In 2020 a top consumer or business printer will not jam on you.

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.

>>Nbox9+kt
> Do you remember printing in 2000?

The impression I get from HN comments is users of monochrome business laser printers from 2000 are the only people who are happy with their printers :)

>>michae+2v
The fallacy of "they don't build them like they used to" applies equally to bridges from 1850, cars from 1970, and printers from 2000: the poorly built bridges fell down, the cars with inferior parts rusted, and the printers with chronic issues got Office Spaced. So of course only the well-made examples survived.

>>paledo+ST
Seconded, however I don't expect our best aqueducts to last 2000+ years

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/11-...

>>pmontr+Lk1
There also a saying that "Anybody can build a bridge that stands up, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands up". The 2,000 year old aqueducts were massively overbuilt, not because they wanted them to stay up forever but because they didn't know how to make them stand up for 20 years without building in a factor of 100 safety margin.

Our aqueducts won't last 2,000 years, but we built them for a fraction of the cost. They'll fall down in 100 years, but we'll rebuild them with something even stronger and even cheaper.

>>jfenge+Zn1
Got any evidence/examples for that, where the cost of building for 100 vs 1000 years has been worked out?

>>Dissid+yy1
I don't; I'm just spitballing the numbers. What really happens is that they'd rather tear down a building after 100 years and build a completely different thing. Even skyscrapers generally get torn down in less than that.

There is some infrastructure (bridges, sewer systems, dams) that are supposed to last longer than that. Bridges are often torn down and replaced, and it's probably more expensive than spending twice as much and having it last five times as long (again, spitballed numbers), but that's what fits in budgets. They don't want to discover that traffic patterns have changed and they need a different bridge, or no bridge at all and have to take it down.

That's becoming a real problem for sewer systems, which in a lot of places are reaching expected lifespan, and it's going to be ludicrously expensive to replace.

Incidentally, there are also reports that the Brutalist buildings are so overbuilt that they're hard to get rid of, even when they're bad (such as having insufficient ventilation). Gigantic piles of concrete will be there in 2,000 years, whether we want them or not.