Of course I have no way of verifying either way. Still I do think the project looks quite interesting, I'm in the market for a printer and this is certainly the most interesting one I've seen in a while.
I agree that the bigger challenge is going to be patents.
It also wouldn't surprise me to see HP add DRM to cartridges to authenticate the printer itself if this catches on. (Possibly requiring a printer driver/firmware update.)
Surely most/all of the patents around the actual inkjet printing function have expired though, right? I had inkjet printers in the mid 00s and if anything I feel like your average inkjet is worse these days.
It would not surprise me if something similar was happening here: HP's current cartridges have at least one piece that is under active patent protection and they don't manufacture any designs that have no patent protection. I don't know enough to state that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I would be shocked to discover that there are counterfeit print heads out there the same way there are counterfeit STM32 microcontrollers.
Unless the patents have something to do with the shape of the cartridge or they somehow have a patent on "technique to fill printer cartridge with ink" which would not be so surprising.
One thing I discovered was that there's whole Chinese industries supplying this stuff in the forms of industrial printers and the application-specific cartridges they consume. And they all had one thing in common: They were based around the functionality of an HP printer cartridge. That was the universal interface.
This leads me to believe that a print cartridge format can be supported by the marketplace for a very long time whether HP likes it or not.
[1]: Printing with white is neat. It sounds impossible and there are those who say it can't happen, but it exists. It's just problematic. The head gets perma-clogged with solids within minutes of disuse in open air. So starting a print job is a race: Get everything set up, uncap the cartridge at the last moment, and then put that cap back on ASAP when the job is over.
>The head gets perma-clogged with solids within minutes of disuse in open air. So starting a print job is a race: Get everything set up, uncap the cartridge at the last moment, and then put that cap back on ASAP when the job is over
Decades ago I helped manage a local's school IT systems and we had these Epson C84 printers that used a very photo grade ink. The printheads would clog after a year of teachers printing like 1 document in that year. During that time it seemed like regular purging of ink regardless of print or not was what kept the printheads going. Strategies used by third party repair firms included submerging the head in a cleaner to dissolve the ink on the outside, connecting pipes with the same fluid to the inputs of the top to the printhead and then finally pulling pressure to try and dislodge the material through the head. Due to the non removable design of the Epson print heads, my attempts at trying this would destroy many printheads. I'd like to think this would be a solved problem in 2026. In your case why not run a purge liquid the printhead after each print? The printhead could then be primed with fresh ink each time.
We were using fixed-head printers that we found at the bottom of a deep rabbit hole. The work moved through the machine while the printy-bits remained stationary. We were doing this with HP-style monochromatic carts that came loaded with high-solids "ink" (closer to paint, really) that used opaque white pigment.
Unlike Epson's ecosystem, HP carts most-commonly come as assemblies, with a new print head included in the same disposable cartridge as the ink is. The only connection between the carts and the rest of the printer is electrical; there's no plumbing or functional fluids that are external to the carts.
This self-contained nature means that when ink runs out or heads gets clogged, replacement of everything involved with fluids is fast and easy. Production can continue immediately.
It's not problematic at all...other than being expensive. :)
Frankly, I think 99% of the reason they started integrating the print head with the cartridge was to avoid all the problems you so frequently see on printers that don’t use disposable heads.
The photos clearly show HP cartridges installed.
Many corporate and government types, especially lawyers, want control. They will go broke trying to control everyone and everything.
It just seems easier to fire off a cease and desist than to take a risk of other people messing around with your ecosystem.
This already happens for basically every commercially-available ink cartridge.
Heck, it may actually save them money. At one point they were losing money on every printer sale and making it back in ink No idea if that’s still the case.
It's also been widely held that ink cartridge compatibility tools/hacks are allowed under DMCA.
However, it does seem likely that there's probably some shenanigan involved in the area - one example I could think of would be if HP have patented the way the ink cartridges are retained in the printer, for example, that would have to be carefully audited. And there will be license and trade secrets issues with the use of the cartridges, although if they were reverse engineered cleanly and the printer doesn't come with cartridges, those are probably pretty easily side-stepped.
I could totally imagine a rapid upheaval of the patent system as soon as we see it being used against us.
Any patents are probably expired or very close to it.
Instead they use the fact mosfet gates have capacitance, and can therefore store 1 'bit' of information. Through a network of hundreds of MOSFETs, the right bits can be put on all the nozzle gates as needed, and then a 'fire' pulse is sent which for around a microsecond turns on a tiny heater (or not, depending on mosfet gate state). The heater boils some ink, making a pressure wave which travels down a pipe and makes a drop of ink fly out towards the paper. That heating and cooling again can happen around 10,000 times per second per nozzle (and there are ~300 nozzles).
I suspect this decision is because the custom silicon process needed to manufacture these nozzles is cheaper if they only have n type MOSFETs - and without p type MOSFETs you can't make a typical push pull logic gate.
The nozzles themselves are quite a lot of silicon - perhaps 100mm^2, with deep etched holes, and are effectively disposable, so I assume huge efforts have been taken to reduce costs - including this curious electrical design.
The protocol also is hugely irregular, which I suspect might be to avoid any wires on the chip needing to cross eachother.
They're noisier than ink printers, but non-industrial quality can be pretty reasonable for office-level noises.
Quality certainly isn't on par with laser printers, but for text (both Latin and CJK), it's perfectly clear.
Did you mean the late 80s'? Growing up we had a Panasonic dot matrix printer from the mid to late 80s that had no trouble with A4 paper.
A lot of car shops with regular 100% humidity conditions will swear by dot matrix + tractor for feeding paper + printing. Plus, the carbon copy forms are guaranteed to be exact carbon copies which also leads to legal guarantees about copies of paper being provably exactly the same in the court of law.
A Matrix printer is essentially a typewriter with extra steps and typewriters had been eating any paper for .. a century before?
Which is to say you can make your gaming PC at home as a one-off if you want. Though personally I won't get near the toxic chemicals used.
Compatible cartridges
HP 63 and HP 63 XL (US)
HP 302 and HP 302 XL (Europe)
HP 803 and HP 803 XL (Asia)
You're saying this as if it is a bad thing? I absolutely welcome this decision by the authors!
But how important?
Imagine someone saying the same thing about MongoDB's license, for example.
If you can't legally use the product, the fact that the source is available is meaningless. CC-NC is a source available license, not an open source license.
If we have a common design them surely we want people to be able to build their own, or buy a prebuilt?
If it is a noncommercial licence then it removes the other option to set up a business selling these pre-built. Not everyone wants to build a printer.
> NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
I mean, the licence says that I can't...
But maybe I'm emotional, as that company has been taking premium for a broken experience of so many people I know. I didn't expect such project going for their equipment.
I switched to laser because I only print like maybe once a month on average (but when I need it, I need it). I'm not the slightest bit worried about the delta energy usage between my laser printer or the inkjet, and I'm sure the inkjet came out worse given the number of cartridges I had to throw away or paper I wasted printing diagnostics.
Still not worth it. My Brother is hitting 10 years now, and I'm trying to think of many scenarios where I really needed to print colour at home.
Even if you can afford a color laser, the problem is a color MFP (ie including a scanner) occupies a lot more space compared to a equivalent inkjet, and for some people this could be a deal breaker.
But really, I've given up on ink jet printers, and have gone the cheap B&W laser route for anything I need to print at home (In the past year, 2 times, a backup ticket and some paperwork that needed a real signature sent back).
But when I had them, the thing that went bad 99.999% of the time was the cartridges or a clogged nozzle on the head. So the advantage here, on the repairability side not DRM, is the rails and motors?
Also that cutter is going to be a pain, having worked on Lightjet printers, that cutter was nearly all field service issues until the FEs started leaving the "laser" key so lab managers could reset the blade themselves.
Seeing chromatic aberration on a document scan would be strange, but this is basically how many document scans are created today (using phone camera + software correction). It's just the lens effects from this cheap lens would be a lot worse than what Apple/Samsung/Google can do with their super expensive to design custom lens stacks.
They've been around long enough that you can find them all over the place used for quite cheap and they likely only need a cleaning.
If the Chinese, who are known for being able to make knockoffs of everything are not able to make inkjet printers, this should tell you how hard it is.
It addition to the print head, reliable paper transport is also really hard. That problem is often sidestepped by using a paper roll or by printing one sheet at a time, as it is the case for the Openprinter.
https://www.delioa.com/products/a4-inkjet-printer/
ZoneWin, a laser printer company, made a clone of both HP LaserJet 1020 and LaserJet M1005, which reuse most of the original/compatible parts (Q2612A cartridge). They claim it's 100% domestic parts only.
https://www.rtmworld.com/news/new-chinese-made-printer-uses-...
Per Google, most HP printers are made in China.
A more likely explanation has to do with the economics of ink jet printers. The ink sales are so profitable that HP and other manufacturers subsidize their printers. This leads to prices at or near cost.
Since Ali express vendors can't count on follow on ink sales, they can't compete on price. And competing on price is Ali express's reason for existence.
So, ink jet printer are harder to find on Ali express. At least, low end consumer focused ink jet printers.
Laser printers, which aren't subsidized are common
all printers are the size of microwave. Inkjets aren't any smaller
> MFPs with ADFs to be exact
at that point you're talking about a full-on office appliance and far above DIY repair scale the discussion is about
There's at least one project that has tried to design an actual DIY/open-source inkjet printer [0], along with inkjet print heads [1].
The ink most likely need some special sauce? But I imagine there's many organizations that can specialize in making the ink so that it can be treated close to a commodity. If not, maybe this can also be engineered?
They do claim that this printer will print in black when the colour cartridge is empty, which they imply is not possible with common printers. The only time I ever encountered that I simply removed the colour cartridge and the printer was happy to print in black.
The paper path itself is mechanically involved, but not to an impossible degree - it's hard to make it work, but it's not MEMS magic, it's manufacturable in the same way advanced 3D printers are manufacturable.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XB7iAFXCJQM&t=17s&pp=2AERkAIB
Sure it could be fraud but it could also just work.
The rest of a printer aren't too hard to design and make, especially if you don't have super tight budget constraints.
Out of ignorance, I wonder how IPR will work with interoperability rights. Patent rights seem like they might not be exhausted when you buy a spare part to use in third-party device, vs when you buy a spare part for an OEM device.
I'm guessing all the tech here has aged out of patent protection though?
I like the wall mounted example with the output paper holder below. Neat.
Saying "no way you will succeed, is way too difficult! look how hard is it for HP" is absolute non-sense.
Also, if the whole printing head is from HP, and they sell it for the price they do, I do not think is the most advanced science the mankind achieved. I would have such doubt maybe if somebody wants to compete with ASML. But Inkjet? really? such an old technology with all patents expired?
[0] https://www.weizmann.ac.il/WeizmannCompass/sections/features...
I would believe most relevant patents are now expired and that we should be able to build a printer that at least gives sufficient quality prints. Given sufficient motivation and time investment, that is.
Inkjet printing requires orders of magnitude more engineering expertise, materials science, industry experience and financial resources than most people imagine. That is the reason, open inkjet printers don't exist despite having been consumer products with the same drawbacks for more than forty years. That is why this is a pre-crowdfund landing page without a demonstrating a working prototype. I would like to be wrong, but I expect you to be waiting a long time. An inkjet printer is not a collection of off the shelf parts. It is a machine that operates at the edge of chemistry, fluid dynamics, and electro-mechanical design...you have to place tiny tiny drops of liquid ink on commodity wood pulp with precision under arbitrary environmental conditions, get that ink to dry on the wood pulp, but not in tank or nozzel, while producing acceptable color, durability, and ease of use. Also lawyers...there are patents.