Comment by matt_s
3 years ago
> I can't wrap my head around how the printer market has turned into this absolutely dispicable, foul state that it is in right now.
There's no room left for innovation or competitive advantage. Its a commoditized market where they only make money when you buy their supplies so naturally they will engineer the product to work well with their supplies only.
This might be an opportunity for open source printer components. Maybe someone can create replacement parts to take out the "brain" of a small printer and replace that with a connected Raspberry Pi that doesn't change the print quality or reject 3rd party cartridges. I know there's likely a lot of settings in the software for head movement, ink usage, etc. so that might take some (possibly illegal?) reverse engineering. I'm a web software person so that idea may sound stupid to someone more knowledgeable.
> There's no room left for innovation or competitive advantage.
What? A hackable, OSS printer whose manufacturer puts time and effort into reducing waste and creating the best, longest lasting ink on the planet would crush it.
Well, maybe not. But anytime anyone has said: “That’s it. There’s nothing more to do here.” It tells me there’s a complacent market ripe for disruption.
How many people are using FairPhone or PinePhone outside HN bubble? I don't know anyone, even though most of my friends are from tech or science... I think that answers if people care about hackability / sustainability or similar
> A hackable, OSS printer
Outside of our bubble nobody cares about that
There is always something you can do, we see it with phones, just add more gimmicks on top, the thing is smartphones are aimed at the general population and became a fashion/class/status symbol. Printers are just printers, they work just fine and most of them are used in pro environment (aka most people don't pay, maintain or replace printers).
> It tells me there’s a complacent market ripe for disruption.
Then let's disrupt coffee mugs, or the wheel... some techs are good enough that further """progress""" isn't required.
Most people who have issues with printers buy cheap ones and/or use them once every 6 months, they then proceed to complain that they don't work anymore and that all printers are bad. It's like buying a car and never doing any maintenance until it dies and then complain about reliability.
> Then let's disrupt coffee mugs, or the wheel... some techs are good enough that further """progress""" isn't required.
There's still room to improve insulation on mugs, and I dare you to go tell any car manufacturer that wheels are a totally solved problem with no room to improve (personally I'm hoping one of the airless variants gets to mass market so I never have another flat).
Some techs are good enough that people get complacent; that's not the same as running out of room to improve.
Yeti built a company by disrupting coffee mugs. Michelan and friends spend a lot of money on improving the tire. Hardi and Trex have worked to produce better wood. Etcetera. Almost everything can still be disrupted or improved.
I kind of want to spend some time on this printer thing, now!
So it sounds like a company like System76 should build a printer and partner with no-brand ink cartridge companies to supply ink.
Or Pine64, then we could use it as part of the build farm when it wasn’t printing.
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.
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.
Reliable physical paper handling, e.g. supporting different paper weights, sizes. and thickness, duplex printing, avoiding paper jams, is nontrivial.
Well given that there are literally thousands of printers on the market that make it work, I'm guessing that can be replicated.
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I believe it's the print heads that are the bottleneck. I don't think they're available to put in your kit.
A chinese company recently began manufacturing inkjet printheads.
https://www.keypointintelligence.com/news/editors-desk/2018/....