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...

Yes, and?

> Literally every printer was suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions.

No. I have gone through 7 personal printers and used countless business printers. Total number of jams I've cleared from my personal printers are probably less than 10 in 20+ years.

I've cleared much more paper jams from top of the line printers regardless of their build year. Reliability of a business printer is a function of its maintenance quality it seems.

My most stubborn printer wouldn't feed some papers since they're too smooth but, it started to happen after 7 years and its feed rollers were dry and worn down at that time.

One of my HP printers started to lose cartridge calibration, made funny noises and gave strange error messages after 6 years. Looks like I've worn down its internals. It was a "disposable" model it seems. I've probably used it three times its expected lifetime.

> The only thing that was better about printing in 2000 is that back then printing was more useful

It's still very useful at a personal scale. I've also cut back my printing to save the trees but, reading articles, academic stuff and a good old technical documentation is vastly better on paper, hands down.