Comment by marcodiego
2 months ago
I want to buy a printer but I want it to simply print what I tell it to (which indeed is exactly how it should behave). What can I do?
2 months ago
I want to buy a printer but I want it to simply print what I tell it to (which indeed is exactly how it should behave). What can I do?
We got open source 3d printers you can build at home __before__ open source regular printers that you can build at home
How come?
Because people aren’t okay with manual feeding, print times in minutes to hours, and 0.4mm resolutions on printed text.
open source plotters that fulfill these requirements do exist. Commercial solutions are just far more mature and accessible for printed text.
2-d printing is a hard, boring problem and many people increasingly print very little, especially hackers.
While most of the printer is pretty simple mechanically and electronically, inkjet heads and laser drums are going to be beyond the ability of most home hobbyists. Even dot matrix heads would be pretty complicated to fabricate with lots of tiny precise parts.
I don't think this is the reason because someone could harvest the heads from an existing printer and make everything else open source.
It genuinely seems that a 3D printer is easier to build; the precision and resolution required is significantly less than for photo-quality (or even document-quality) printing, right?
Previous discussions on hackernews (see this comment [0]) claim that the paper handling hardware is part of the problem. It's apparently quite difficult to do reliably (thus all the 90s jokes about paper jams) and all the known solutions are locked up under patent
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37007815
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Because no-one, especially the kind of person who's into open-source, uses printers often enough for the problems to bother them, and because the existing commercial products are highly optimised and effective.
Even if nobody is building a printer from scratch, I'm surprised there isn't some kind of open source firmware project (like there is for, say, digital cameras) just in order to avoid all the driver nightmares people complain about.
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The commercial printers are fine for all normal uses and absurdly cheap. Ink, less so.
Whereas 3D printers are a niche tech for tinkerers; playing with building the printer is as much a part of the fun as actual usable output.
Monochrome laser printers don't have tracking dots.
(* That I have seen evidence of.)
I wonder if a pen plotter could replace a BW printer, probably adequate only for certain types of documents.
Buy Fuji Dimatix print heads and build your own.
Good luck with your currency counterfeiting.
I'm curious how long it has been since an even half-way convincing fake could be printed on a home printer (even if it were totally unlocked). My guess is quite a while. Maybe you could do it for small denominations that don't have color shifting inks, but I'm pretty sure that paper that even sort of approximates the feel would make it not economically viable, even on a home printer.
The reason most of it gets detected is that it doesn't succeed at being half convincing.
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If, in our current world, the only reason you see for privacy is to commit a crime, then the shame is on you.
In our current world, I don't see a reason to own a printer.
If there is someone sending out printed communications that needs that level of security, and wasn't committing a crime, I'd love to hear about it. Because it'd seem like they'd have to completely avoid the mail system, leaving fingerprints, or licking the envelope.