I’ve spent the last 3 weeks delving into printing and how they work. I started this with a very general understanding with knowing little difference between print technologies, laser, inkjet etc etc. What brought this on was a need for a printer and having an understanding of printing where I knew printers follow the economics of razor blades, so not wanting to get ripped off had me delve deep.

And what I found is: laser printing is mechanically, and economically superior to inkjet technology. For most documents laser is much cheaper, and prone to failure by a far less degree than inkjet printing, this is of course discounting image rendering.

Inkjet is hostile to openness by design:

why?

• Precision fluid dynamics
• micro-level XY motion of both paper and print head
• chemically specific inks
• and extremely fragile print heads

In particular, HP cartridges and other brands that now follow in HP’s footsteps, marry both the print head and the cartridge into one consumable item. They are temperamental to ink, heat, and use as they are made to be thrown away. This is not conducive to the hacker ethos of experimentation.

The Raspberry Pi team released an “HP Killer” that depends on HP cartridges. This, while a step in the right direction, is still locked into an ecosystem many of us wish to escape. The printer is dependent on the throwaway print heads, will only accept inks made to spec.

Laser printing is a better foundation for open source printing.

Why?

• Distinct elements -- toner, drum, optics, and fusing
• Less tolerance dependence (fine toner powder rather than liquid ink)
• Less moving parts (mono)
• Simple deterministic logic

Toner size can vary unlike chemical makeup of liquid inks. Toner is also cheaply available at larger quantities.

An open sourcing of laser printing:
could be to marry both the philosophies of 3D resin printing and laser printing, keeping the toner, the heated roller and forgoing the laser and drum in place of an array of electrodes, similar in principle to an LCD. The open source community understands LCD technology, it’s matured, software solutions exist already, this makes it easier to drive than a prism firing a laser at a drum.

Selecting pixels on the electrode array to charge, dusting toner then placing a sheet of transfer medium (paper) atop to then roll a heated roller over will bind the toner to the paper. We have thus printed something.

Sadly I’m no coder or an engineer, but the issue of printing in the open source community has been a frustration before and especially after my heavy research of printing. So if this idea is useful I want it to be out there even if it’s only useful in inspiring someone to take a different angle at this problem.

This project won’t revolutionise printing, I doubt it could even print at a legible standard for office use. But mechanically, it lends itself to the hacker/tinkerer space. It allows wide tolerances, experimentation that won’t brick a print head and is understandable to the general community.-------