I am wondering why there is no open framework for laser printing.
There are a few parts that would have to be made out of sheet metal. The sides could be stamped for the same pattern. You then need a back and a cross section. One could theoretically make them from ABS, but ABS gets brittle with heat and the sides will shatter.
One side of the printer is dedicated to running an ARM SOC. I’m not sure if the Arduino is up to the task, but it will need to control 3 motors, initiate a heating sequence, start a rasterizing laser, interpret a print job, communicate over network and USB, and monitor a bunch of sensors.
The hardest parts will be obtaining print cartridges, rollers, and fusers. Designing a standard to run off a certain vendor’s hardware will be a pile of issues, and nobody will just start manufacturing hardware for a handful of hobbyist printers.
Everything else is 3d printing, springs, and screws.
2d printers need to be a lot more precise. 300dpi means each dot is placed with less than a tenth of a mm, and that’s not even particularly impressive for a 2d printer. 3d printers get away with a lot more slop than that.
That’s only talking about greyscale. Color requires precise alignment of the cartridges for at least 4 base colors (higher end photo printers have even more) , and the mix of those colors must be carefully controlled to get accurate output.
Yeah, that is one of the big problems I was considering. Even monochrome at 300 DPI would be a problem. The imaging array and drum would need to be manufactured separately and installed as whole unit.
At least it only needs to be precise if the register is adjustable. You would need some tiny stepper motors right? I’m not familiar with how register is adjusted on desktop printers, but I know it can be.
Well, cartridges, rollers, and fusers are the important bits that can’t easily be manufactured by hand. And that’s a big part of the price of the printer.
You can’t really make them cheaper than mass-manufacture, and laser printers are already almost bulletproof from my experience.
My cheap old 3D printer requires constant fiddling before and after every print, yet still fails probably half the time. I avoid printing things sometimes just because I don’t want to deal with it.
I would still agree with you 100%. I hate my HP printer so much.
Honestly who NEEDS a printer anymore? We’ve moved on from printing out driving directions from MapQuest and burning our own DVD collections. We should ditch home printers and only use online printing services whenever you want something physical so it’s made nicely by someone who knows what they’re doing.
It can still be nice to have one so you can print out more pages in parallel than you have space on your screen and using a pen to annotate a document.
I would only think them to work better on Linux because the software you’re using isn’t made by the printer company. Their software sucks. The hardware sucks, too. They’re made to be shit because a perfect printer isn’t profitable.
Since I've moved in South East Asia, I have discovered that:
Almost every single printer that exists has a conversion kit available on Taobao to use big ink bottles
There's not a single firmware that hasn't been hacked, nor a single part that hasn't been cloned
Therefore, most printer manufacturers have a specific line of durable products that allows the use of third party ink because if they don't, other people will bank of their product maintenance and they won't sell much.
The only reason we in developped country get scammed like we are, is because of IP laws and governments that allow manufacturers to abuse them with no consequences at the expense of the customers (and the planet).
Look up your printer model number on Alibaba. Or better yet, on Taobao (but if you don't speak Chinese it's a bit complicated). Your options depending on the printer you have are going to be :
Print heads conversion kits (a replacement of the complete print heads module with tubes feed from ink bottles attached outside your printer)
Refillable ink cartridges
Counterfeited Compatible ink cartridges that cost a fraction of the official ones while having 10 times more ink in them.
Now depending on where you live and the local laws it may or may not be legal to import those. In the country I live in there is no law against it. In most South East Asia the law doesn't care about that and if it does, law enforcement doesn't. :)
On Linux, I had to go through a dozen different drivers and just as many driver versions before I found the one that worked with my printer. For Windows, it worked immediately.
With my old printer, though, it was the opposite experience. Took forever to get it working on Windows but Linux got it immediately.
You’d think by now, with the dozen different printing standards that exist, we’d have some sort of plug and play driver that could work with every printer.
Seriously, one of the best ways to fix printer issues with windows. Is to buy a cheap raspberry pi zero or similar. And stick it in between as a print server. It solves so many random issues for both bad printer, firmwears and fucky windows behaviors
My hp printer has worked perfectly and reliably with CUPS for years now. Just turn it on and print, works every time.
Open source print drivers, baby! I still hate CUPS though.
My printer has to go through like 5 power cycles for it to even detect its ink cartridges. I guess thats what i get for taking the ewaste printer from the office
Brother printers were the last straw in throwing away they last inkjet I ever hope to own.
Want to scan something into your computer, you say? Sorry, can’t do that because you’re low on magenta!
No idea if their laser printers try the same crap, because I avoided that brand when it came to picking one out, but holy crap what an off-putting experience.
I don’t own a Mac outside of my work laptop. Like OP said in another reply, it’s likely because vendors pre-configure the system to work out of the box on Mac OS.
It’s just my anecdotal experience but writing off my comment as me justifying a purchase (that I haven’t made) is just silly and lazy discussion
It’s just my anecdotal experience but writing off my comment as me justifying a purchase (that I haven’t made) is just silly and lazy discussion
Somebody made that purchase, though. dismissing the cost point for apple products because you didn’t personally fork over is… amusing. Also, most vendors configure for windows, aka the OS with the largest market share of desktop computing devices. Some vendors (like epson), who cater to photography or graphic design will also ensure it works in Mac, but as noted elsewhere, the drivers for the printers in MacOS and linux are the same- CUPS. if printer compatibility is what you were looking for, you got taken for a ride. (this is not to say there aren’t valid reasons for living in Apple’s walled garden…there are… it’s just printer hardware isn’t one of them)
I learned that the CUPS config on Mac, at least as of about a year ago, was set to save a copy of everything ever printed to an obscure directory on the machine. Was discussed in relation to setting up a secure encryption scheme where you print out your keys, wouldn’t want something like that just hanging out for any malware to come gobble up.
It used zeroconf/bonjur out of the box when no one else used it (or had to do some serious configs in order to get it working), that’s why. And, of course, since it’s the second most used OS other than Windows, printer manufacturers configured avahi/zeroconf/bonjur out of the box on their printers.
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