I don't think this is quite right. An open source 2d printer would allow for a lot of things commercial printers don't allow for. For example, I'd like to be able to print on things which are not paper. If I had an inkjet head mounted on something, there's a ton I could do with it, from modifying it to print directly on fabric, to integrating it with other fabrication technologies to make decorated objects. Even a CNC mill or laser cutter with an integrated printhead would be invaluable, both for labeling parts and decoratively (for making pretty parts).

There's a massive growth curve too. If we could find a way to print on plastic, we could integrate this with a 3d printer and make decorated parts. I think this would be multiple stages of amateur R&D, but it would eventually happen (yes, I suspect someone will respond with all the technical issues why it can't work with current technology, ignoring all disclaimers -- I am aware this won't work right now).

I think of tons of other use cases.

I think the problem is as others have described. Making a printhead costs peanuts, but engineering one and NREs are astronomical. Ditto for paper handling, and many other parts of the printer. There used to be an printhead open enough for DIY (you could buy them in quantities of 1, and there was a spec sheet), but it's not sold anymore.

> An open source 2d printer would allow for a lot of things commercial printers don't allow for. For example, I'd like to be able to print on things which are not paper.

Those kinds of printers already exist commercially. The argument is the same: Printing on clothes or PCBs might be cool, but crappy DIY printers that can do that are even more niche than crappy DIY printers that print on paper.

I think the argument is that $200 crappy is better than $2000 commercial for a lot of uses.

If I'm labeling pins and parts on a PCB, I'll take low-quality labels over no labels any day. If I'm labeling how wood fits together on a laser cut, I'll take it. If I'm making educational resources, quality almost doesn't matter.

If I could have a 1980-era printhead I could control, I could do a lot with it.

And if we had that, quality would improve with time. Look how many years it took 3d printers to be useful for anything practical. I expect if we started even with 1980-era inkjet quality, we'd get to nice in 5-10 years.

I also wouldn't underestimate the challenge of moving paper. I once spoke to someone who worked for Kodak (or a similar company - it was a long time ago) who said that they acquired another printer company purely because their paper moving technology was excellent and it would have taken years to develop an equivalent quality of engineering internally. This was before the present day race to the bottom in the printer market.

If you haven't read it already, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams... is a lot of fun.

A bit more than ten years ago I worked for Ricoh on an embedded software that was reporting the state of printer. Had a lot of fun trying to fold papers in different ways to try to trigger jams at different place of the printer to test that we were reporting jams accurately :)

Excellent long-form popular technical(ish) article; well worth the read.

Yeah. printing on a single hand-fed sheet: probably "easy". Reliably going through a random pack of 500 pages, not so much.

Something pen-plotters don't do (they typically want paper to be placed down for them, or work of a roll of paper), and the maybe 3D-printer equivalent of preparing the print bed and removing prints from it is a well-known source of problems and manual work.

I think that's a key point you've made, which is that open-source 3D printers don't do the part that would make them useful for scale production (transitioning the work pieces off the print surface and preparing for the next run).

Nobody would accept a 2D printer that took manual intervention every sheet.

Having taken apart a color laserjet to repair the paper uptake I agree. That was a lot of engineering to make sure the paper moves through the path repeatably.

While I'm sure it's a challenge, after watching 3D printers evolve over the years, I've no doubt that random people will find unique and amazing ways to handle the problem.

Paper printers have been around for ages though, and decades of R&D have been put into them. 3D printers have started to find a foothold relatively recently.

The FDM 3d printer model took off ONLY because the patents around the FDM printing head expired.

How about laser engraving tech? Can a laser engraver be tight focused to 300 dpi and power set (or sensed) to just make a mark on white paper? Does the positioning accuracy also need to be improved to get that 300 dpi?

You'd never run out of toner at least.

Edit, answered at least one question: yes engravers do 500 dpi routinely. Here's one: https://www.troteclaser.com/en-us/knowledge/tips-for-laser-u...

The issue is then speed, you can't engrave at anywhere near the same speed as you can print.

I would not consider an engraver for which you have to call to ask the price as "routine". From what I could find, the cheapest trotec is $16k second hand on ebay (and there is another from their cheap line for $56k second hand). You can hire somebody to handwrite everything you need for that kind of money.

Also, high power lasers are consumables.

I didn't suggest using an engraver. I was suggesting engraver tech for this thing we're proposing here. The real question is can you get a good result marking paper with a laser? Maybe I worded it poorly first time.

Or we could get rid of paper and just print everything on plywood.

> Printers are cheap and widely available

Then how about a printer that can print on a large wall? E.g. with spray paint.