The OpenPrinter project (see the CrowdSupply project’s page) aims to create an open source repairable printer. It has some interesting features.
I was starting to believe the project was dead but they gave some news on their progress today : https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer/updates/progress-update-and-details-about-our-nomination-for-a-french-design-award.
I post it here since the project is lead by french people and would be an alternative to many printer manufacturer.
While I like the idea of an open source printer, there’s just no world in which I ever buy another inkjet printer. I print way too infrequently.
There’s something about supporting something even if you have no personal use of it.
So yeah I to don’t plan to use one, but I support the hell out of anything that busts the balls of big, entrenched and enshittyfied big tech.
Agree, I really don’t need a printer at all, but I’m still rooting for the project to succeed
I have apprehensions about it being inkjet as well, but the possibility of not having tracking dots in everything I print is a nice prospect. The privacy factor overrides my desire for laser
I solved this privacy issue by having all the ink nozzles dry out, so the dots can’t be printed.
Well, this is a disturbing new fact I learned today. 😅
Yes, it’s incredibly dystopian, but thankfully open source saves the day again with Deda
It’s not clear to me exactly what Deda does to anonymise a document before printing, they talk about masking the dots, but it seems to me that the easiest way would just be to create a list of all possible dot positions, and print a yellow dot on a random subset of them (or, indeed, all of them), so confounding anyone trying to identify the real dots. Ideally this would be a CUPS filter, so you could just set it up once and have all printouts anonymised.
That’s also something you can do with Deda. It’s a full analysis tool with reading, identification, creating custom dots, and masking dots. So for example, if you use openprinter for something subversive but want to avoid identification due to lack of dots, you could create fake dots to hide that your printer doesn’t use them
Considering it’s open source and on a roll, one could simply print like 1 mm a week and it would never dry out. Or whatever the minimum would be based on current conditions.
Sometimes technological advancements aren’t necessarily progress. I may be wrong, but print heads clogging was less frequent and easier to fix when we didn’t have picoliter droplets.
I’m very glad to see this project is moving forward. It’s long overdue that we have open source printers.
I can’t stress this enough - this is he most important open source hardware ever.
This is so cool! It looks to be much smaller than your typical printer, while still being able to print relatively large sizes (A3 and the American equivalent “tabloid”), neat! Many larger printers are only able to do A4 (or “letter” size if you’re American)
Having something super repairable, no proprietary drivers and cartridges, etc. is always good too.
600/1200 DPI (latter for coloured prints, former for greyscale) looks impressive considering most people usually print at around 300 dpi I think, hopefully this means the print quality is excellent!
I think it’s good that they haven’t released the price of it yet, and given how the prices of pretty much everything, especially in electronics, seem to fluctuate these days, it’s good not to overpromise on anything.
Thanks for sharing, in case anyone cares about the companies in the printer market:
HP and Xerox are from the US.
Canon, Epson and Brother are from Japan. Some other companies that create professional machines are from Japan too.
If you’re buying European because of things happening in the US, in this case just skipping HP is your best strategy.
You should probably skip HP regardless of what’s happening in the US.
- HP Adds 15 Minutes to All Customer Service Phone Calls
- Ink Required to Scan and Fax
- Account Required to Scan
- Firmware Updates Stop HP Printers from Working (Errors 79 and 49)
- HP Locks Printers if There Is a Failed Subscription Payment
Canon is apparently following HP’s lead on some of these things as well
Well too bad the printer is just open access but not really open source. No one else is allowed to make money off of this. This makes is so a real ecosystem can’t form around this. If their license at least allowed profit-neutral projects. Only hobbyists can mod this for themselves and the main company could incorporate that later on
Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good. It is still fantastic compared to the very proprietary and closed ecosystems of HP, Canon, and similar
Then why aren’t they up-front about it? Why are they calling their thing “open source” if it isn’t?
If they’d call it “source available” printer, then they are better then closed source alternatives, but if they aren’t honest… I’d rather buy from someone that is clearly telling me what they are selling to me, instead of obfuscating or maybe even lying about it.
My 15 year old printer just died… I don’t want Ai printer or ultra connected crap printer.
Oh Brother where art thou.
They’re not open source, but they’re built like tanks and the toner is cheap.
Brøthër, may I have the prïnts?
Did you not read the title of the video or the pinned comment it references?
I’ve been keeping an eye on this project and I’m thrilled to see an update!
Great news! I really can’t wait to see where they continue to take the program.
I came across a wireless thermal printer at a thrift store a while back for 5 bucks. Prints from a roll like the one in the picture but the roll is stored inside the printer. And it’s about 1/3 the size of the one in the picture. Paper is cheap too, I can get about 23 pages per roll, and a 2 pack of rolls is $12. For the amount I print it’s nice.
Looked at the comments and immediately saw others pointing out that it’s inkjet and…yep. That might be a deal-breaker?
Laser is just such a better deal and I’ve had my old Brother printer forever, and while that’s not repairable, I wonder if I’d just end up spending more money over time on something like the OpenPrinter.
Very cool project though, regardless!
Wait, this is inkjet? Hard pass for me. I commend the effort, though.
What’s so bad about inkjet? The ink is going to be cheap since it’s not proprietary cartridges and the clogging issue is very overblown IMO. I’ve had one crappy cheap Canon and one crappy cheap HP inkjet and neither one dried up when left alone for several months. Took the HP being unused for 5+ years on what was still the original ink cartridges for it to stop printing.
This being open source hardware means if it DOES get clogged, the parts will likely be cheap, and it not having ultra tight tolerance nozzles AFAIK means clogs are less likely to happen.
I’m likely not buying/building one because I just don’t need to print things that often anymore (hence the HP sitting around for years between prints), but I don’t foresee inkjet being a deciding factor in THIS case. It would be if I was getting a proprietary printer.
Yup. one thing is clogging (I’ve experienced it many times in the past). It might be cheaper to repair with this one, but still annoying. Then there is print quality affected by moist during and after printing. And lastly, the ink price. Which again, it might be reasonable with this one, but who knows. The first two reasons are enough for me to avoid it. But again, it’s great effort and I hope it succeeds.
