zlacker

No, you're right. There's nothing particularly magical about a printer. The PCL and Postscript specs have been in place for decades. Writing a driver to take that output and drive a print head to put it to paper should be pretty straightforward. (Needing to mark each print at the behest of the Secret Service to prevent counterfeiting is a question mark to me. Is that spec public?)

It SEEMS like you could make printer "kits" for people to assemble themselves, which would take bulk ink, and escape all of this nonsense. But then you'd have to sell it in stores, where HP, Epson, and Brother would act like any other large corporation to block chains like Best Buy and OfficeMax from carrying it.

>>TheRea+(OP)
I believe it's the print heads that are the bottleneck. I don't think they're available to put in your kit.

>>TheRea+(OP)
Reliable physical paper handling, e.g. supporting different paper weights, sizes. and thickness, duplex printing, avoiding paper jams, is nontrivial.

>>layer8+0R
Well given that there are literally thousands of printers on the market that make it work, I'm guessing that can be replicated.

>>nicobu+X1
A chinese company recently began manufacturing inkjet printheads.

https://www.keypointintelligence.com/news/editors-desk/2018/....

>>TheRea+i41
They make it work to various degrees, after decades of experience and R&D. It certainly won’t be easy, judging by the difficulties printers often still have.

>>TheRea+(OP)
I recall in the past, laser printers shared significant guts with copy machines. That's a product with an effectively 100% business market, so they're going to be way more TCO-driven.

From what I understand, once you get far enough above the SOHO market, even current printers are still that way. I suspect in the past, the small laser printer market was getting trickle-down benefits from technology innovations to service the commercial market, but now it's become its own free-standing market which no longer responds to the same signals.

It also makes me wonder if that's the road to an affordable, if overkill, printer-- a module that bypasses the scanning side of a used copier, and renders your PostScript data to it.