We're 20 years late on this
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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Looks nice! I want it. I don't print allot. But i need it to work with linux.
"Doesn't allow people to build it"
Uuh, that sucks but i guess that perfection is the enemy of good
It looks really neat! Depending on the price, I might get one :)
Expect this to be priced like a laser printer. Most inkjet printers are subsidized by cartridge lock in and ink priced higher than platinum by ounce.
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For a reasonable price and good reviews, this could be my next printer.
Thinking about my most recent desire to have a printer, which I haven't had in many years, I was building a bed, and it would have been nice to have a cut sheet printout to take to the garage. Instead, I used my tablet, which worked well enough.
It's so rare that I use paper for taking notes, I have to track down something to write on, often it's an envelope.
It'd be nice to have a printer around for occasional use, but I'm afraid the ink would dry up between uses.
Get a cheap laser printer. The toner won't dry out, and you can get a very reliable printer for cheap. The Xpress series from Samsung was cheap and very reliable. Unfortunately, Samsung does not manufacture printers any more and their printer business was bought by HP. I have no idea how new HP models compare to the old ones.
I'd probably look at Brother, a monochrome laser printer can be had for $120, and Brother generally has a good reputation. If you want to print in color, that'll be more expensive of course. Honestly, I haven't had a color printer in 11 years and I don't miss it, but YMMV.
I've had a monochrome Brother laser printer for about 14 years now. Still using the original toner that came with it, though it's down to about 20% or so. Prints every time I need it which isn't very often, but when I need to print something, I actually need to print it.
Having been an IT guy for a very long time this is my recommendation to everyone. Buy a cheap laser printer for your home. Ink jet is garbage it will piss you off every time you want to print something, it's a trap. Go with whatever brand you want, but brother is the one I'd recommend most
In my home I have a brother color laser printer, it may have run over $300, I don't recall. But I don't recall because I think I bought it 15 years ago and it still works just fine every time I need to print. No regrets.
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Remember to include the price of a new toner cartridge when looking for a cheap laser printer. Some become quite expensive when you include it.
When I bought a small office laser printer for making stickers it took me four years before I needed to change the cartridges. It only came with those partially full ones too. Unless you're printing dozens of full color sheets a day the cost of cartridges is likely a minimal consoderation
I once bought a Xerox for very cheap for office work. Buying a brand new Brother was cheaper than buying toner for it.
You could if you want. But then again, remember that most people will be replacing that toner cartridge only once every 2-5 years. So it's not like a major expense.
It depends on how much you print of course, like if you're a teacher or something, you might print a lot.
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I wonder how much of the ink drying up thing is designed in to modern printers to waste ink in head cleaning? I suspect that someone with the consumers' best interest at heart may be able to find a solution to that problem.
Worse than that, the printer I have, a Brother MFC-J895DW, actively eats its own ink on purpose (in the name of keeping it from drying out). Like most people, we print infrequently and I noticed that like every other time we would go to print we would be out of ink. After a bit of searching I found out this was a known thing and it was done on purpose.
I now turn the printer on to print and off when not printing. I haven't bought ink in over a year. Yeah the print heads need to be conditioned if you go to long between prints, but so what.
That's just what happens when you have stuff dissolved in solvents.
People still /print/ things to /paper/?
Well, yeah. When I'm DMing it would be nice to have some pretty looking battle grids.
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Seems to me needlessly mechanically complicated. Why not just build for single standard paper, then complicate later?
Based on the description, it's perfectly capable of printing single standard (letter, A4, even A3) paper. The roll is just an option.
How is pulling a sheet from a roll more complicated than pulling a sheet from a stack?
Higher chance for paper jams to occur maybe?
Nah, feeding from a roll is significantly easier than feeding from a stack of sheets. Tons of variables when it comes to the stack whole a roll is much more consistent and avoids the issue of reliably pulling a single sheet from a stack which is not a trivial problem.
Yea its sometimes quite hard to separate pieces of paper with your fingers, i have no idea how machines do it
A bunch of rollers that need to be cleaned fastidiously if you want them to keep working.
They dip their fingers in honey first.
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I suspect because feeding and aligning sheets is much harder than feeding from a roll. Probably requires some sensing hardware, which might be fiddly.
... supports 600 dpi black-and-white printing and 1,200 dpi color.
Ouch. 600 DPI black and white and "1200 DPI" color resolution is very low for an inkjet.
The big missing detail remains price.
At these resolutions I'd rather get a laser printer that's well supported in Linux no matter what the price is.
That doesn't sound right, so I pulled up the specs of my Canon Pixma. It's also 1200dpi, so this matches up with my regular consumer printer.
What printers are you using where 1200dpi is low?
Edit: Pulled up an Epson EcoTank and even that's at 1440dpi
I remember owning 300dpi printers.
And dot matrix printers!
Well, your Canon Pixma is real 1200 dpi, this one on the other hand is 600 in bw and 1200 in color. Generally speaking, this is a marketing trick used by printer manufacturers to make a printer sound better and what they do is they sum the dots of each color, advertising resolutions like 4800 x 1200 dpi. This means the actual resolution is 1200 dpi but horizontally they count the dots of each CMYK channel.
My guess is they can print a stable image in bw at 600 dpi, but in color they are limited to 300 (multiplied by the 4 channels). Also my guess is that this is because they seem to be struggling with halftoning, as written in the article:
On the software side, work continues on Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity, as well as dithering algorithms designed to improve image quality.
Also, keep in mind dpi is not linear. Images are 2d, so a 1200 dpi print contains 4X the dots of a 600 dpi print.
Okay, but that doesn't answer the question. You're claiming 1200dpi is very low, but aren't backing that up.
I'm sorry, English is not my first language, and I may not have explained clearly.
The open printer likely prints at 1200 x 300 dpi (explained in my other comment) in color and the author of the article just reported it as 1200.
There is no was they can achieve stable cmyK prints at 1200 dpi, but only 600 dpi with just the K.
Therefore your printer is likely 16X more precise than the open one. This is quite important as inkjet printing is meant for high quality prints as it's both slow and expensive.
The big thing here is this printer is repairable, there no spyware or vendor lock in for specific ink cartridges.
This is hardware that if you buy you truly own.
Honestly for these reasons alone I am going to buy this.
I went immediately "they started making opensource print heads.... since that is huge effort"... Oh it is just a carrier assembly for HP inkcartridges. Sure hack refillable ones, but still the main printing part is from big corporate. Waiting for the moment of "HP implemented backward DRM on their cartridge. HP cartridge only works, if it hears correct attestation from the printer."
This all is based on them hacking a corporate part and that is newer sustainable open hardware route.
Using a print head a maker sells as just "We make printheads, what you do with it after is your business. We exactly sell these as industrial parts from people to build printer around (or whatever other device you have use for ink depositing thingie in)" fine. That is normal.
But "hey we made open inkjet printer". "So you figured the vast tasks of designing and manufacturing inkjet print heads?" "No" "You found a suitable standard industrial part to build around, less amazing, but still okay?" "No" "So what did you figure out or provide to table?" "We hacked HPs part". Soooo everyone using this is still paying HP tax and who knows HP might shut this whole thing down one way or another.
edit: Not to mention it is not like it is some impossible task to get inkjet printheads, like all legit and so on. One web search later leads for example to KonicaMinolta industrials website for their catalog of "Here we sell just the Inkjet heads, incase you want to make a printer. Here is the spec sheet how to run it."
So in the end is just another open project goin to fail :(
Fair, and I admire them for trying. I was just pointing out that these specs are closer to a 10-15 yo laser printer, which is likely cheaper to buy and print with.
If they were producing q laser printer of similar specs with open firmware I'd be first in line to get one.
A 10 to 15 year old laser printer is going to have its fuser fail in a year and that replacement part costs as much as a new printer.
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