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The Fairphone of printers: does it exist?
(reddthat.com)
A community for troubleshooting printers, as well as share tips and tricks.
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.