Printing is declining
Printing is declining
Posted Jul 30, 2025 5:12 UTC (Wed) by Vorpal (guest, #136011)In reply to: Printing is declining by jengelh
Parent article: Help for OpenPrinting needed
My only guess is that it is hard to get hold of the specialised parts needed, in particular the drums (for laser printers) or the ink jet nozzles (for ink jet printers).
One option would be to reverse engineer a traditional cartridge with build in nozzles, and then build the rest of your open printer around it. And someone did this for adding ink jet colouring for 3D printers. But they didn't document their reverse engineering from what I can tell (see https://hackaday.com/2024/12/28/full-color-3d-printing-wi...).
Posted Jul 30, 2025 7:19 UTC (Wed)
by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
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Posted Jul 30, 2025 11:51 UTC (Wed)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
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That's because those open/DIY 3D printers are generally considered toys that need a ton of constant hand-holding and tweaking to get decent, consistent results. They're also slow-as-heck, relatively speaking.
Putting that aside, it also makes no economic sense; you'd never be able to meaningfully compete with even the crappiest commercial offerings as they (1) have cost-optimized every penny out of the manufacturing process, and (2) often sell the printer below cost by subsidizing it with legally-enforced proprietary consumables or tie-in services. Additionally, you're also competing against the substantial second-hand market for older higher-end gear.
Third, you still need to secure your own long-term supply of consumables, keeping in mind that 3rd parties can and will undercut you... and it's your reputation, not theirs, that will suffer if the output quality is crap. Oh, and that also goes for the printer itself too; the moment you put your design (and perhaps more importantly, the embedded software) out there for China, Inc to copy, you effectively end your ability to recover the non-trivial design NRE. (I'd SWAG that at as easily a quarter million USD, more for a design that's truly ready for mass production)
Fourth, there are legal requirements for color printers (relating to preventing currency counterfeiting) that may require some degree of non-openness in the printer firmware.
I could go on, but that's just off the top of my head.
Posted Jul 31, 2025 7:26 UTC (Thu)
by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
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Posted Jul 30, 2025 12:28 UTC (Wed)
by malmedal (subscriber, #56172)
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I assume because it's hard with the resources a typical hobbyist has. However if you're happy with a plotter, there are many of them for instance https://www.brachiograph.art/
Posted Jul 30, 2025 18:28 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (8 responses)
Laser printers are even worse. Starting from the word "laser" itself. Few things go better with DIY than instant permanent blindness if you make a single mistake.
Posted Jul 30, 2025 19:08 UTC (Wed)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
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Your point about the precision requirements for printer manufacturing are spot-on, but for the past couple of decades, pretty much all (non-industrial-scale) "laser" printers on the market are actually based on an array of LEDs. Far lower power, far safer, and requiring a lot less manufacturing precision.
But even assuming your ultra-high-precision print head (be it movable inkjet or fixed LED array or whatever) is manufactured by a specialized supplier, the rest of the printer still has some pretty high precision assembly/calibration requirements -- eg for 600dpi you need ~0.4mm accuracy in your feed and/or head positioning mechanisms, along with a media path that has to handle a near-infinite variety of "paper" types, weights, and thicknesses and feed all of that reliably in deserts, swamps, and everything in between. And then there's the matter of speed.
At only 3ppm, you have 20s per page, which equates to an average feed speed of ~14mm/s. If your print head has to move (eg on an inkjet) and you have a 6mm head (which at 600dpi has has 144 vertical elements) that takes about 47 passes for a page, which works out to a bit over 5m/s of average sustained speed... reversing direction every 20cm or so.
...and at every 1/600dpi horizontal step, you need to precisely meter out a certain amount of ink from each of those 144 nozzles. Fun times!
Posted Jul 30, 2025 21:53 UTC (Wed)
by malmedal (subscriber, #56172)
[Link] (6 responses)
I think the actually hard bit is the *combination* of applying toner evenly and getting it to fall off where you don't want it by shining the laser on it and the fusing it to the paper with heat.
The laser bit, by itself, is done in many projects, for scanning or exposing photo-resist for PCBs. For instance: https://github.com/hzeller/ldgraphy
Posted Jul 30, 2025 23:00 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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My hair started moving after seeing this. 2W is a class 4 laser (anything above 500mW laser is), which is the most serious category. It can cause permanent blindness with a stray reflection, faster than you can blink.
As a former laser safety officer, I would shut down this whole thing in a nanosecond.
The design doesn't have any interlocks, the optical path can allow stray reflections to exit the body. It's not clear if the plastic can absorb the laser wavelength enough. And in any case, I don't see any failsafes in case the mirror actuator fails and the laser burns a hole through the housing.
To even safely work with this during the R&D, you need to follow all the safety rules. This means that your bench must not be higher than waist level, the door to the lab must have interlocks that disable the laser if opened, you have to ALWAYS wear the safety glasses, you can't bend over to pick up anything from the floor unless the laser is locked out, etc.
Posted Jul 31, 2025 13:14 UTC (Thu)
by malmedal (subscriber, #56172)
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At least this one is going via photo resist. The really scary ones cut directly with a fiber laser.
Posted Jul 31, 2025 22:06 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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Lasers are absolutely unique in their danger to eyesight.
You can't really do yourself a lot of physical harm with a laser. If you accidentally get a 2W laser beam on your skin, it'll be a bad burn/cut. If you're really unlucky, you might get damaged tendons or bad bleeding. It might suck, but it likely won't be life-changing.
But if you get that beam into your eyes? It's instant eye damage. With life-changing consequences and no real treatment options.
So if you want a DIY project, please just avoid lasers. Really. Laser safety rules are written in Braille.
Posted Aug 1, 2025 10:20 UTC (Fri)
by malmedal (subscriber, #56172)
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The text in the video says it shows a 500mW laser, and that he has a 2W to make it faster on *order*.
I am not arguing that this is a good idea, or in any way safe, just that this is a thing that is being done.
But I must say I am actually a bit surprised at how few reported laser injuries there are compared to the number of projects I see. With other dangerous projects, like lichtenberg wood burning, there are several fatalities each year. Not sure if this is inherent or just that the laser people somehow have more respect for the dangers. The majority of the laser injuries I have heard about have been to uninvolved bystanders, e.g. somebody pointing a strong laser at a crowd or something.
Posted Aug 1, 2025 11:48 UTC (Fri)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
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Posted Aug 1, 2025 13:49 UTC (Fri)
by malmedal (subscriber, #56172)
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Printing is declining
Printing is declining
Printing is declining
Printing is declining
Printing is declining
Printing is declining
Printing is declining
Printing is declining
Printing is declining
(I've only seen xy plotter versions of these)
Printing is declining
Printing is declining
Part of it is that the most common form of laser injury is eyesight impairment; lasers very rarely kill or leave obvious marks. Someone who notices their eyesight being bad after a laser exposure may well delay getting an eye test, and then attribute their loss of vision to age, instead of injury.
Laser dangers
Laser dangers