With an inkjet, most of the ‘difficult’ engineering and manufacturing is in the print head. The rest is just a basic x/y bot to move the head and paper around- easy engineering and manufacturing. They use someone else’s print head so they get around all that. That makes this a fairly easy design- just figure out how to trigger the cartridge nozzles when the head is in the right spot, write some code for rasterizing the image into print strips, and you’re done.
With a laser, there’s a lot more work. You need an entire optical system (laser, spinning mirror, etc), you need high voltage stuff to charge the drum, you need a high wattage heating coil for the fuser, etc. There’s a lot more engineering and coding work involved and more manufacturing also.
I didn’t say inkjet was good. I was explaining why it is a lot easier for a hobbyist company to build an inkjet printer than a laser printer.
I would absolutely love an open source laser printer. And probably buy it just on principle even though I have no need for it.
i didnt say you did.
i mean yeah its sick theyre doing it, realistically you can make it work if you print something once a week or whatever. would be cool if you could do an automated print job every so often to prevent it drying (im sure this is feasible)
Inkjet… I’m out.
Actually kind of a necessity.
With an inkjet, most of the ‘difficult’ engineering and manufacturing is in the print head. The rest is just a basic x/y bot to move the head and paper around- easy engineering and manufacturing. They use someone else’s print head so they get around all that. That makes this a fairly easy design- just figure out how to trigger the cartridge nozzles when the head is in the right spot, write some code for rasterizing the image into print strips, and you’re done.
With a laser, there’s a lot more work. You need an entire optical system (laser, spinning mirror, etc), you need high voltage stuff to charge the drum, you need a high wattage heating coil for the fuser, etc. There’s a lot more engineering and coding work involved and more manufacturing also.
yeah but they get dried out and waste ink if youre not a frequent printer
I didn’t say inkjet was good. I was explaining why it is a lot easier for a hobbyist company to build an inkjet printer than a laser printer. I would absolutely love an open source laser printer. And probably buy it just on principle even though I have no need for it.
i didnt say you did. i mean yeah its sick theyre doing it, realistically you can make it work if you print something once a week or whatever. would be cool if you could do an automated print job every so often to prevent it drying (im sure this is feasible)
Necessity or not, I don’t want one. I’ve done enough IT support to know Inkjets eat ink unless they are used every few days.
So close, yet so far…
My thoughts exactly when reading the headline.