* an anime character printed with a thermal receipt printer * a 4x6 card with an information graphic I rendered with CSS Grid * a shutterfly envelope to family in New England, etc.
most of the time I am starting with an image somebody else made, but there is a lot of judgement involved with fitting the image to paper and process -- it is a bridge between the world of digital images that I work and play in and the real world.
I go through printers the way rock stars go through guitars and what to do with the e-Waste is already part of the product.
I am amazed the the HP Officejet 6600 which just failed on me -- despite the expensive ink, the quality of the work it could do is astonishing.
It stopped picking up paper because something (like a little plastic gear) broke in the drive chain for the pick roller. To be fair all the rollers looked pretty worn -- the printer had been heavily used by a college professor. It's possible we could have fixed it but considering the cost of the next ink refill, I chose to get another printer.
If I were going to salvage the old printer I think I would go for the stepper motors, which would be great for robotics and other mechatronic projects.
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I badly want to hack an inkjet printer to print white ink onto transparencies and then put it into a second printer to take a PNG with alpha like
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:793Nihilego.png
and make a sticker that could go in a window. Commercial kits to do this cost about as much as a good DSLR lens and they are a business expense to people who are making large quantities of swag.
It's a good market case for the "open source 2d printer" however. It's one thing to get white ink compatible with the printer, it's another thing to get the transfer function between "75% transparent" and a certain amount of ink into the printer's brain.
Assuming the printer has sufficient color resolution/depth, you could do gamma correction as a preprocessing step on the host computer. Still obnoxious, though.
