The open-source, DRM-free Open Printer shows off a working prototype
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132 replies
Would be nice, if it was USB by default and Ethernet/Wifi just a module you attach. For most private users, the IoT part of printers is actually a security hazard. Especially for such a portable device.
Edit: private users
i can’t remember the last job i had with non networked printers. that would only work with very small offices.
Ethernet by default with an optional WiFi module would be ideal.
On the one hand, I'm really excited about this because the printer industry is literally the worst. On the other hand, I haven't printed anything for years, I probably won't use it much/ever.
I print things still pretty consistently. Random forms that need hard copies to have a wet signature, activity sheets for the kids to color, templates for drilling holes in walls, etc. Make the business a lot less toxic and I think you’ll start seeing printers in more homes again.
Say it with me pow-der based to-ners.
For printing art? :<
That's why I want a printer, personally. For documents and stuff we can go to the library. Printing kinky furry art, not so much.
-- Frost
My ink printer which has been empty on ink since 2017, is my scanner and nothing else. I think I got that printer free with a mail-in rebate.
Rememeber when they used to just give printers away with almost anything? Buy a camera you get a printer with a mail-in rebate, but a stereo you get a pritner, buy any computer over 400$ and you get a fuckin' printer 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Anything. Literally anything. I've noticed laser printing for pictures gives that nice quality and it just bumps everything up by a mile. https://www.lexmark.com/en_us/printers/printer/14385/Lexmark-C3224dw
That's the one I've had for almost ten years.
The new model is exactly the same and like 350$ but the amount of money you save on ink is incredible. I ate the high upfront cost because I knew I would be saving on ink.
I got the big bottles of toner powder for like I think 80$ (ebay) which is what the cost of one ink cartridge. So for the cost of an ink cartridge I have 3 1/2 refills worth of powder for my toners.
Ooh, good to hear there are laser printers out there that can print good art!
Also $80 for a cartridge?? holy HECK ink is a ripoff. Wow.
-- Frost
I haven't purchased ink in so long I forgot the price. I just googled it. Looks like it could range depending on the brand name and the printer you're getting the ink for could be 15$ could be 60$ depending on full sets or singles but they're so small and run out so quick. You'd be spending 60$ on like three cartridges for what a laser printer could do for less than half of that. And that would be just your black cartridge. So if all of them ran out that's about 80$ a set.
Its probably just much cheaper and easier, unless you absolutely have to have color, to go to good will and get a brother laser printer for like 10 bucks.
I got one years ago and its still on the original toner cart it came with, and I print decently often.
I tried that once with a Dell LaserJet. Managing printer drivers was a nightmare, and every time I plugged it in, the lights flickered. Eventually I got rid of it because the hassle wasn't worth the effort.
I can’t wait for the laser ink variant!
Ah, you have one of those electric diesel cars I've been hearing about
I don’t know of any diesel electric cars, but most diesel locomotives use their diesel engines to generate electricity to run the drivetrain.
Same with ships.
Edison Motors!
Or natural gas being called a “green fuel” by German politicians.
I bet they have liquid ice, too.
Laser ink as in gray/brown-scale that chars the paper no ink needed!
That's direct thermal, not laser. Problem is direct thermal prints don't last very long and the paper is expensive. Thermal transfer uses expensive ribbons, and laser is super complex.
I hope someone finds a way of making laser charring/printing less complex.
Oh goody, we might have a real use for the "Printer on fire" message in the Linux kernel again!
Hopefully this means no hidden yellow tracking dots.
Those are only on colour laser printers.
I don't care how "open source" the printer claims to be. Both hardware and software belong to Belzebub. Such was the dark pact printer makers signed in blood decades ago, and all land shall obey by those words. We shall hit the print button and wallow in torment forever.
Aaand its dependent on HP print cartridges. This is a hard problem but the dependence on HP will probably backfire
But you can just refill those yourself. The biggest problem with HP printers is that it times out cartridges, even if there's ink left.
Do you have a tutorial on how that's done?
You just buy a kit online. Tons of videos of each specific cartridge type online.
From what I can tell the print head is built into the cartridge and that's the hard part for printer technology.
But I think you might be right depending only on the hp cartridge will open them up to cease and desist. If they make it also use a cannon cartridge that also has a print head then I think they might be ok
I think the fact that it's hardware will prevent any cease and desist (or rather the legal teeth behind them). It's not licensed IP but a physical product.
Like I think of it more like 3rd party car parts. Depending on the part, they often need to target specific makes, models, and even years of cars. It's why so many parts have had encrypted handshakes with the main computer (John Deere is famous for this but I understand some cars are doing it for some parts these days, too) because they couldn't just stop them in the courts.
I'm not sure that this is how it will work but hopefully. Also selling ink cartridges is how HP makes its money and it uses some of that money to subsidize the printers themselves, so they might like that this printer sells more of those rather than moving entirely away from their ecosystem.
Yeah, ultimately it probably does end up selling more cartridges over time. Like even with the refillable ones you still gotta replace them eventually because of the print heads. Honestly, the more I think about it I think I'm just gonna continue to not print things out at my house and just use the Kinko's when I need to for a dime a page. I mean how much do I actually print out anyway. This is the same math I did when decided not to buy another ink cartridge last time my printer stopped working
It is not open source with that license.
PittyPity.(CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0, the non–open-source part here being NC)
TBH im ok with the NC clause. Otherwise they'll be replicated and enshittified by big and small brands, push for anti-features as standards and end up with stuff like Bamboolabs
As an ESL, I had to look up pitty thinking it has to do with pits
Pity and Shame typically go hand an hand, you’ll hear people say “That’s a shame” but you can replace shame with pity “That’s a pity” and achieve the same result.
However when addressing another person, you won’t hear people say “I shame you” instead you’ll hear “I pity you” to show displeasure or anger to another person.
Hope this helps!
I think it's mostly because above spelled it wrong and it made it just different enough that we thought it was a new word.
It looks really neat! Depending on the price, I might get one :)
Expect this to be priced like a laser printer. Most inkjet printers are subsidized by cartridge lock in and ink priced higher than platinum by ounce.
Honestly, I don’t mind inkjet as a technology, the quality is plenty good and I don’t give a crap about speed. And as you can see from this design they’re a whole lot more compact. The whole reason I don’t use them is the predatory ink pricing, which this product in theory solves!
For now, you can get inkjet printers that use liquid ink. Ostensibly Canon wants me to use Canon brand ink for my printer, but there's nothing stopping me from buying some off brand and dumping it in the tanks
Tank inkjets tend not to be subsidized because of the lack of lock in. They're considerably more expensive than those that use cartridges. So you are paying for the ability to put in whatever you want.
Which to me is a no-brainer. (I do have a laser printer though)
Yeah, mine did cost like $160, but it is nice to know that canon can't decide to end support and brick it in 10 years
That's actually a good deal for a tank inkjet last I saw.
I'll stick with my 15 year old brother laser that's still works just fine.
Don’t bother my Brother, brother from another mother! We’re Brother brothers!
Semantic satiation is kicking in…
Which one? I find the print quality from Brother to be below HP, I think because Brother uses LED and not laser.
Virtually useless unless it supports non consumer ink cartridges or you buy chinese drop in knockoffs.
And even then only if you need to print graphics/images in high quality.
All hail laser.
No love for the 9 pin dot matrix?
My favorite dot matrix memory is printing a like 400 page Breath of Fire 3 strategy guide on a daisy wheel dot matrix, and it took over night to print and everyone in the house complained about the constant ditditditditditditditditdit
edit: And the ribbon was so worn out that you needed forensic equipment to read it, but i persevered.
I remeber being 7 or 8 and rolling a ream of that paper down our hall and drawing dinosaurs from one end to the other
Bit late now, but a tiny squirt of WD-40 into the ribbon cartridge often got you another few hundred pages out of it.
about 30 years too late, lol
But thats gonna be one of those things thats gonna be stuck in my head for the rest of my life.
It'll come in handy later on when you're in that government doomsday shelter and you need to print a hard copy of the nuke disarm codes on the line printer that was big enough to need a tarp as a dust cover.
I would love to have the same model Star Micronics I had in the 90s. Selectable tractor or friction feed, 24pin, multiple text fonts...it was nice.
hooray my fuser has jammed, my transfer belt has stretched, toner is smeared everywhere, my printer weighs a ton.
How often are you moving your printer that the weight is a concern?
I have wiped a toner cartridge with a paper towel and chucked thst sucker back into a ye olde HP from 20 years ago with a broken guider clip and it still prints perfectly fine.
I wiped it because it was leaving a smudge at the edge of the paper after never cleaning the rollers for aforementioned 20 years.
I guess I can add briefcase printer for mission impossible as a use case for inkjet lol
HP Laserjet 4000 here. I love it. I could use it to kill a skunk and then put it back on the desk and print a novel for $0.25
Here's the video of it in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB7iAFXCJQM
For a reasonable price and good reviews, this could be my next printer.
I want to support this but what stops me is ink. Is ink the best choice over toner or laser?
Laser printers use toner.
Laser printers are also more complex devices.
Thank you clearing that up.
It's cool, but "It uses refillable HP cartridge bodies – HP 63 in the US and HP 302 in Europe" worries me. I used to have a high-end inkjet for art prints, and then they discontinued the ink cartridges. You can still technically get them on ebay, but they're at scalpers mark-up. So I don't hold much hope for this lasting in the long run.
I would be surprised if a cartridge being discontinued would kill an open source project like this. They could switch to a different cartridge.
I'd assume they're doing the one for now because it's cheap-ish and has widespread availability. There's little reason not to expand to other cartridges once the rest of the printer is more stable.
Good thing this is just a prototype
We're 20 years late on this
It's a pity that it is using the worst printheads available on the market, the HP disposable ones. Good for up to ten prints I guess
For anything beyond document printing, I agree with you. But for this use case, the fact that the print head is disposable is a good call. Large plotter printers have dump trays and maintainence cycles to keep the ink liquid and moving, the parts are more expensive to replace.
Because your only using the head and ink well independently, nothing is counting pages or stopping you from refilling it. Its the best of both sides of consumable parts.
Dude just get a powder toner laser printer. I've been filling the stock toners in my Lexmark instead of buying ink. Fuck, ink.
Looks nice! I want it. I don't print allot. But i need it to work with linux.
If someone can make an open-source 24 pin dot matrix printer, that would rule.
The sound of a dot matrix printer is bliss
Just hammering away like it's life depends on it then that sweet rip of the page
Man that brings me back
Oh... does anyone still make fanfold paper?
Thinking about my most recent desire to have a printer, which I haven't had in many years, I was building a bed, and it would have been nice to have a cut sheet printout to take to the garage. Instead, I used my tablet, which worked well enough.
It's so rare that I use paper for taking notes, I have to track down something to write on, often it's an envelope.
It'd be nice to have a printer around for occasional use, but I'm afraid the ink would dry up between uses.
Get a cheap laser printer. The toner won't dry out, and you can get a very reliable printer for cheap. The Xpress series from Samsung was cheap and very reliable. Unfortunately, Samsung does not manufacture printers any more and their printer business was bought by HP. I have no idea how new HP models compare to the old ones.
I'd probably look at Brother, a monochrome laser printer can be had for $120, and Brother generally has a good reputation. If you want to print in color, that'll be more expensive of course. Honestly, I haven't had a color printer in 11 years and I don't miss it, but YMMV.
I've had a monochrome Brother laser printer for about 14 years now. Still using the original toner that came with it, though it's down to about 20% or so. Prints every time I need it which isn't very often, but when I need to print something, I actually need to print it.
Having been an IT guy for a very long time this is my recommendation to everyone. Buy a cheap laser printer for your home. Ink jet is garbage it will piss you off every time you want to print something, it's a trap. Go with whatever brand you want, but brother is the one I'd recommend most
In my home I have a brother color laser printer, it may have run over $300, I don't recall. But I don't recall because I think I bought it 15 years ago and it still works just fine every time I need to print. No regrets.
If you're just printing documents and stuff, laser is fine, but they do look quite bad for art prints, which is the main use case these days for inkjet.
Ok, yeah I can believe that. And if you're using it for art printing, you may even be printing often enough that the feed lines don't dry up and clog.
Personally, I like that with laser prints, if someone gets the paper wet, the toner doesn't immediately run all over the page like with ink.
But again, less of an issue for art prints, as the results are more likely to be put in a frame than left out on a table where they can get splashed.
Remember to include the price of a new toner cartridge when looking for a cheap laser printer. Some become quite expensive when you include it.
When I bought a small office laser printer for making stickers it took me four years before I needed to change the cartridges. It only came with those partially full ones too. Unless you're printing dozens of full color sheets a day the cost of cartridges is likely a minimal consoderation
I once bought a Xerox for very cheap for office work. Buying a brand new Brother was cheaper than buying toner for it.
You could if you want. But then again, remember that most people will be replacing that toner cartridge only once every 2-5 years. So it's not like a major expense.
It depends on how much you print of course, like if you're a teacher or something, you might print a lot.
I don’t know about brother anymore. I have one I bought because it would work with 3rd party ink. I updated the firmware and am now locked out from using anything but brother. I would up finding a hack to get it to stop checking the ink level, so I can at least print, but it’s a temporary fix (have had to do it a few times), and it makes it unable to tell me how much ink is left. No big deal, I just run the cartridges dry, but it’s less functional than when I bought it..
Nutshell, I used to trust bother, not anymore so an open option is a big desire of mine. If this is halfway decent, I’ll pick one up.
Will a factory reset get rid of the firmware update(s) on your model? It's not guaranteed but sometimes that will get you back to where you started.
If it does, all that's left to do is to completely close down any automatic update path (network access to internet, cable access to internet-connected PC, whatever applies to your situation). Yes, you can turn off automatic updates in settings, but on newer models especially that's not the guarantee it once was, esp on Windows machines with bidirectional printing features enabled: Windows will force update the printer itself. Anymore I set all my printers to wireless and then block them by MAC address at the firewall.
No, I think I can downgrade it, I need to find an older version of the firmware as they don’t have it available anymore. I think I need a 2024 version.
I do have auto updates turned off, I should just block it at the router.
That should do the trick. Good luck.
I wonder how much of the ink drying up thing is designed in to modern printers to waste ink in head cleaning? I suspect that someone with the consumers' best interest at heart may be able to find a solution to that problem.
Worse than that, the printer I have, a Brother MFC-J895DW, actively eats its own ink on purpose (in the name of keeping it from drying out). Like most people, we print infrequently and I noticed that like every other time we would go to print we would be out of ink. After a bit of searching I found out this was a known thing and it was done on purpose.
I now turn the printer on to print and off when not printing. I haven't bought ink in over a year. Yeah the print heads need to be conditioned if you go too long between prints, but so what.
That's just what happens when you have stuff dissolved in solvents.
But couldn't you just cap it off and flush the line after each use?
Maybe? Sounds like a tricky thing to automate and then you also have solvent as an additional consumable. This is a problem even with huge industrial inkjets.
"Doesn't allow people to build it"
Uuh, that sucks but i guess that perfection is the enemy of good
Pre AI driven ram/nand increases: < $500 probably. Now, probably >= $1000.
Who the fuck prints stuff on paper in 2026/2027.
So this year at home I've printed: packing slips and address labels, images for the kids are project, insurance documents to keep in the car (Europe trip), plane tickets as a backup. Some course notes summary things.
At work: fuck loads of stuff, basically same as home x10
Label stickers, coloring sheets/labyrinths for kids, sheet music for the piano... It's about 4 pages a month, but it's not nothing
Print out my campsite instructions since it’s supposed to be outside of internet service.
If you’re working on a manifesto it’s a good idea to print it out so it’s easy to find.
I'm as grumpy and old-school as they come and even I only print about a sheet a month. Usually some datasheet, a technical document, for me to scribble on as I work things out.
People still /print/ things to /paper/?
Yep
Yeah, like 3-4x/week.
This includes things like train tickets, because I refuse to have to have my phone with me.
Sheet music, shopping list, letters to doctors/government offices/...
Well, yeah. When I'm DMing it would be nice to have some pretty looking battle grids.
Seems to me needlessly mechanically complicated. Why not just build for single standard paper, then complicate later?
How is pulling a sheet from a roll more complicated than pulling a sheet from a stack?
They have cutter intergrated inside which add complexity.
Higher chance for paper jams to occur maybe?
Nah, feeding from a roll is significantly easier than feeding from a stack of sheets. Tons of variables when it comes to the stack while a roll is much more consistent and avoids the issue of reliably pulling a single sheet from a stack which is not a trivial problem.
Yea its sometimes quite hard to separate pieces of paper with your fingers, i have no idea how machines do it
A bunch of rollers that need to be cleaned fastidiously if you want them to keep working.
They dip their fingers in honey first.
I suspect because feeding and aligning sheets is much harder than feeding from a roll. Probably requires some sensing hardware, which might be fiddly.
Based on the description, it's perfectly capable of printing single standard (letter, A4, even A3) paper. The roll is just an option.
Ouch. 600 DPI black and white and "1200 DPI" color resolution is very low for an inkjet.
At these resolutions I'd rather get a laser printer that's well supported in Linux no matter what the price is.
That doesn't sound right, so I pulled up the specs of my Canon Pixma. It's also 1200dpi, so this matches up with my regular consumer printer.
What printers are you using where 1200dpi is low?
Edit: Pulled up an Epson EcoTank and even that's at 1440dpi
I remember owning 300dpi printers.
And dot matrix printers!
Well, your Canon Pixma is real 1200 dpi, this one on the other hand is 600 in bw and 1200 in color. Generally speaking, this is a marketing trick used by printer manufacturers to make a printer sound better and what they do is they sum the dots of each color, advertising resolutions like 4800 x 1200 dpi. This means the actual resolution is 1200 dpi but horizontally they count the dots of each CMYK channel.
My guess is they can print a stable image in bw at 600 dpi, but in color they are limited to 300 (multiplied by the 4 channels). Also my guess is that this is because they seem to be struggling with halftoning, as written in the article:
Also, keep in mind dpi is not linear. Images are 2d, so a 1200 dpi print contains 4X the dots of a 600 dpi print.
Okay, but that doesn't answer the question. You're claiming 1200dpi is very low, but aren't backing that up.
I'm sorry, English is not my first language, and I may not have explained clearly.
The open printer likely prints at 1200 x 300 dpi (explained in my other comment) in color and the author of the article just reported it as 1200.
There is no was they can achieve stable cmyK prints at 1200 dpi, but only 600 dpi with just the K.
Therefore your printer is likely 16X more precise than the open one. This is quite important as inkjet printing is meant for high quality prints as it's both slow and expensive.
The big thing here is this printer is repairable, there no spyware or vendor lock in for specific ink cartridges.
This is hardware that if you buy you truly own.
Honestly for these reasons alone I am going to buy this.
I went immediately "they started making opensource print heads.... since that is huge effort"... Oh it is just a carrier assembly for HP inkcartridges. Sure hack refillable ones, but still the main printing part is from big corporate. Waiting for the moment of "HP implemented backward DRM on their cartridge. HP cartridge only works, if it hears correct attestation from the printer."
This all is based on them hacking a corporate part and that is newer sustainable open hardware route.
Using a print head a maker sells as just "We make printheads, what you do with it after is your business. We exactly sell these as industrial parts from people to build printer around (or whatever other device you have use for ink depositing thingie in)" fine. That is normal.
But "hey we made open inkjet printer". "So you figured the vast tasks of designing and manufacturing inkjet print heads?" "No" "You found a suitable standard industrial part to build around, less amazing, but still okay?" "No" "So what did you figure out or provide to table?" "We hacked HPs part". Soooo everyone using this is still paying HP tax and who knows HP might shut this whole thing down one way or another.
edit: Not to mention it is not like it is some impossible task to get inkjet printheads, like all legit and so on. One web search later leads for example to KonicaMinolta industrials website for their catalog of "Here we sell just the Inkjet heads, incase you want to make a printer. Here is the spec sheet how to run it."
So in the end is just another open project goin to fail :(
Fair, and I admire them for trying. I was just pointing out that these specs are closer to a 10-15 yo laser printer, which is likely cheaper to buy and print with.
If they were producing q laser printer of similar specs with open firmware I'd be first in line to get one.
A 10 to 15 year old laser printer is going to have its fuser fail in a year and that replacement part costs as much as a new printer.
I mean, commercial printing is typically 300-600 DPI…
Not exactly. While the images you send them are usually about 300-600 dpi, the halftoning is rarely done at 600 or less.
At 600 dpi, AM halftone dots are painfully visible, and even FM halftones can be distracting and lead to a defect usually called "color noise".