The original discussion in Reddit is from May 2025. I wonder what new information is available since then.

From the linked post, my takeaway is to look for a Brother color laser printer.

Inkjet = printing ink more expensive than blood per liter

-> Laser = incredibly long lifetime for a cartridge (afaik unused ink, that doesn’t stick to the paper, gets filled back into the cartridge)

Color Laser printers have a much higher price point, but they last much longer and are not designed to use up Color’s for black printing like inkjet does.

Inkjet is one of the worst scams I know of.

Also inkjet use up ink without usage. Time alone will decrease % of each cartridge. My laser uses the same cartridge since like 2015, and got used before too I guess, because I was gifted the printer.

https://hackaday.io/project/202990-open-printer

Open Printer is an open-source, repairable inkjet printer designed to outlive your laptop, dodge planned obsolescence.

Laser - it costs money because it saves money. (Paraphrasing a movie quote about copper plumbing).

Not really. There are “open” printers but they’re generally super hacky. If you’re printing a lot I wouldn’t necessarily rely on that

Printers are actually tremendous feats of engineering and manufacturing. This is why almost (if not all) of the open printers reverse engineer an already made cartridge by HP or whatever, the print head is insanely difficult to create and essentially requires semiconductor lab conditions. Knowing how it works is a small piece compared to actually manufacturing it

Additionally printers are a patent hell situation. The reason we saw a sudden boom of 3d printers in like 2014 with reprap was because the stratasys patents for fff printing finally expired. Consumer 3d printing could’ve existed years earlier and the technology goes back to the 80s. Printers are similar except instead of broad patent for “inkjet printing” or whatever it’s literally thousands of patents about microfluidic transfer systems or whatever. This also speaks to the difficulty involved again; the 3d printer concept of squirting hot plastic through a nozzle is nothing in terms of complexity when compared to an inkjet printer.

There was an update yesterday and it seems like they aim to launch this autumn.

If it delivers on its openness promise, I will probably get one with the roll to print A3