Open Printer is a fully open-source inkjet with DRM-free ink and no subscriptions
9 months ago by ardi60 to c/technology
The only complex part of the hardware is the HP cartridge controller, and you have at least part of the work here: https://hackaday.io/...
from their own page
Open Printer will use the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license for all of its files, including electronics and mechanical design files, firmware code, and the bill of materials.
Thanks I addressed that seconds ago https://lemmy.world/post/36926543/19781367 and my bet is that it's an omission, so I asked on CS Discord just in case but yes people should be mindful of that before the crowd funding campaign start. Hopefully it'll be fixed.
Despite the clickbait headline this isn't open source
Open Printer will use the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license
The NC license isn't open source, it violates point six of the OSD
Also means that a robust community of people creating businesses to sell variations of the hardware for those who aren’t as maker friendly cannot emerge, correct?
Bc imo that’s what really got early 3d printing off the ground. Like back in 2010 during the reprap days there were all the independent maker storefronts plus a few bigger ones like lulzbot and makerbot (that eventually all got put out of business or bought for toxic modern shit like bambulab because in the modern day under capitalism every single industry has to consolidate until it’s under a few large extremely consumer hostile companies with okay products that just eventually get worse and worse bc there’s no competition or regulation for them but I digress).
Without this industry or a proper open source platform I don’t see how this will succeed
Also means that a robust community of people creating businesses to sell variations of the hardware for those who aren’t as maker friendly cannot emerge, correct?
Correct, that's just one of the problems with NC licenses.
legally
Therein lies the other issue, unless the creator has millions of dollars to fund lawsuits, if a large company or Chinese company decides to clone it he can do nothing. The only people who will respect the license are individuals and small businesses.
Creative Commons doesn't even seem appropriate for hardware. Like, that's trying to apply copyright law in patent's realm.
While I'd personally love to see an open color lazer printer more. (Less wasteful and more rugged) This is still fantastic! It's always been a saying of mine that modern printers are the torture devices of our time. This could go a long long way to right a lot of these wrongs. I will definitely have to check this out.
While I’d personally love to see an open color lazer printer more. (Less wasteful and more rugged)
I use a black-and-white laser printer, but if I were going to use a color laser printer, I'd like to have an open color laser printer simply because I'd like to have a printer that isn't dumping printer tracking dots into each image I print.
Yes, I have a black and white brother lazer printer. That thing is a workhorse. Still gives problems every so often, but far more reliable than any inkjet printer I've ever had. And far less costly to maintain.
How do you know which models do and dont? Print tracking dots.
Specifically note the updates
(Added 2015) Some of the documents that we previously received through FOIA suggested that all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable. Although we still don't know if this is correct, or how subsequent generations of forensic tracking technologies might work, it is probably safest to assume that all modern color laser printers do include some form of tracking information that associates documents with the printer's serial number. (If any manufacturer wishes to go on record with a statement to the contrary, we'll be happy to publish that here.)
(Added 2017) REMINDER: IT APPEARS LIKELY THAT ALL RECENT COMMERCIAL COLOR LASER PRINTERS PRINT SOME KIND OF FORENSIC TRACKING CODES, NOT NECESSARILY USING YELLOW DOTS. THIS IS TRUE WHETHER OR NOT THOSE CODES ARE VISIBLE TO THE EYE AND WHETHER OR NOT THE PRINTER MODELS ARE LISTED HERE. THIS ALSO INCLUDES THE PRINTERS THAT ARE LISTED HERE AS NOT PRODUCING YELLOW DOTS.
Thanks for the link. Wild.
Oh I know. No shade on them for starting with inkjet. Long term though the lazer/LED printers are just the more economical and sustainable option. This is a welcome disruption regardless.
That’s true. I don’t print much (I’m happy to go to the print shop) but my wife does quite a bit, but not enough to keep the ink from drying out.
After buying two inkjet printers and having constant problems with the cartridges it probably would’ve been cheaper to start with the Brother laser printer I eventually bought. I didn’t realize that HP would lock out cartridges from their subscription on cancellation either (which feels very morally wrong to me).
It's technically more money upfront, but you're not just buying the printer itself: you're also buying the starter ink/toner cartridges that come with the device. The starter toner gives you vastly more pages than the starter ink, and it basically never goes bad. According to Brother, the size of a starter toner cartridge is 1000 A4 pages. According to HP, their Deskjet and Envy starter cartridges print about 150 and 250 pages, respectively.
So that higher upfront cost doesn't just go into a better, more efficient machine; it also goes into quadruple the starting pages or more. There are people who could seriously never print more than 1000 pages, whereas the starter for a Deskjet is so small that you practically ought to buy a spare cartridge alongside the printer for when it near-immediately runs out.
Basically, if I'm not flat-ass broke, I'm paying another $63 upfront for an XL ink cartridge from HP for one of these printers. And what's the page yield? 430. I'm still not even near the starter toner cartridge page capacity after spending an extra $63 on ink. To me, the upfront cost of an inkjet printer is pragmatically higher unless I'm so boots-theory-of-economics broke that all I can afford is the printer unit and only print a few pages a month tops.
Unless something about inkjet has improved in the 15 years since I was more inclined to know everything about them, the "goes bad" is what anyone with a brain should be focusing on. The first time you use a cartridge to print, it has a shelf life. It gunks up, prompting cleaning cycles that use dozens of pages worth of ink. If you only print a few pages a month, there's a good chance you're getting <40 pages out of that $63 cartridge.
I have a Brother DCP-7065DN, paid $64 for it in Feb 2014 (obviously a very good deal), page counter reads 3626. We're on toner #3 including the starter, first was replaced in 2019, second in July 2025. Toner was $55 each.
I hope there aren't people seriously advocating for inkjet printers for black and white anything. The only thing they are good for is photos, and even then you are paying more per print for a worse photo vs local print or online order options. That holds true even if you get good deals and somehow actually use the entire cartridge set without waste, I did the math a few times over the years. The only use cases are printing shit you're too embarrassed to risk printer shop seeing, or is illegal/copyright, or you just like giving money to these garbage companies.
Maybe projects like this will change the math. I think if they targeted commercial print specifications it would be quite interesting. The jump to larger format printers is so expensive.
I bought a toner printer in 2020 and I'm still on the first replacement cart. I have over 2000 pages printed.
Considering I spent $80, plus $40 on the new two pack of toner, I consider it money well spent.
I do wish I had bought a laser printer though... There are things I would like to begin printing that will be several thousand pages after it's all finished. Mostly reference materials. DISREGRD THIS I DUM
Only for colour laser because they're much more complicated internally. My B&W isn't any bigger than an inkjet scanner/copier/printer combo unit.
Exception: Definitely heavier.
We tried the owls in some of our meeting rooms and we scrapped those.
What's the point of having a 360 camera in the center of the room when everyone will stare at the big TV anyway? All the people at the other end see is everyone looking sideway to the camera.
If you buy their TV bar unit, apparently you can pair the two to cover longer tables. The people in the back are covered by the table unit and the front is covered by the bar.
I know this from reading knowledge base articles because no organization I've ever been apart of ever wanted to spend the money on a good system that covered everything properly, so I have never had the chance to do it.
Are you talking to me? Oh, you weren't? Then who were you talking to?
Who? Who? Who? Who?
I have nothing against the damn pests until they start to making their nests near my house, since the college the same owl have his nest near and the fucking screaming the whole night.
Sometimes even when the mother abandon the nest and the owls grow up one asshole offspring refuses to hunt and spend the night screaming wait for his mom back with, until it gave up on starvation and goes way or (hopefully) dies
Sounds like it sucks at every level. From what I've dealt with on just software/drivers:
You want to use scan to email through anything that isn't a fully open, no auth, anonymous SMTP relay? Go fuck yourself.
Wait... we changed our mind. We'll totally support SMTP authentication, but with an arbitrary undocumented limit on the password length we can store, which is definitely shorter than the password length requirements for most SMTP relay suites. Certificates? Holy shit are you from the future?
Or you can scan to network share, but I hope you enjoy finding all the hidden catches and caveats that are completely undocumented!
You want an option so people have to log in at the printer itself to release their print job? Enjoy six different interfaces for five different underlying standards for how that works across two different manufacturers. And we reserve the right to just stop supporting that feature or change it entirely with any firmware or driver update. And if there's a mismatch between the driver and firmware then we'll just make the print spooler/job queue shit itself and require manual intervention to continue printing.
You want our driver to properly communicate to end user software the paper sizes it supports? If it supports double sided printing or not? How it will collate multiple copies? Man, we can't even care enough to indicate to software if we're Black and White or Color. Best we can do is completely ignore the options you picked through your software and our driver and just do whatever we think is best. That's a good compromise, right?
For the price of these god damn enterprise mfds, there's no excuse.
You can get inkjet printers that don't have restrictions on the ink. They cost more, though.
The reason printer manufacturers are so hell-bent on being a pain in the ass with the ink is because they're using a razor-and-blades model. They're selling you the printer at a lower price than they really should, if their price reflected their costs, with the expectation that they'll make their money back when you buy ink at a higher price than you really should, because people pay more attention to the the initial price of the printer than to the consumable costs.
Same way you can get unlocked cell phones instead of network-locked cell phones with a plan. Gaming PCs instead of consoles. It's not that they're unavailable, but you're gonna have to accept a higher up-front cost, because you're not getting a subsidy from the manufacturer.
Canon sells a line of inkjet printers that just take ink from a bottle. No hassles with restrictions on ink supply there. The ink is cheap, and there are third-party options that are even cheaper readily available...but you're going to pay full price for the printer.
Their lowest-end "MegaTank" printer is $230:
A pack of third-party ink refill bottles is $15, and will print (using Canon's metrics), about 7,700 color pages and 9,000 black-and-white pages:
Compatible GI-21 Black Ink Bottle Up to 9,000 pages, GI-21 Cyan/Magenta/Yellow Ink Bottles Up to 7,700 pages
On the other hand, Canon's lowest-end "cartridge" printer, where they use the razor-and-blades model, is $55.
But you rapidly pay for it with the ink; It looks like they presently sell a set of replacement cartridges for $91. And that set will print a tiny fraction of the number of pages that the above ink bottles will print.
page yield of 400 Black / 400 Color pages per ink cartridge set and cost of $90.99 for a value pack of PG-285(XL) and CL-286(XL) ink cartridges (using Canon Online Store prices as of June 2025).
So if you really do want to do photo prints with an inkjet without dealing with all the DRM-on-ink stuff, you can do it today. But...you're going to pay more for the printer.
All that being said, I do think that lasers are awfully nice in that you don't need to deal with nozzles clogging. You can leave a laser printer for years and it'll just work when you start it up. If you don't need photo output, just less hassle.
Can OSI trademark "open source" and sue companies for not meeting its definition?
Certification marks are a type of trademark, and is precisely what is wanted here.
I'm biased towards all software being open sourced.
Certificate marks look potentially useful if many more people cared about the value of open source (software freedom). People who do care probably already know common licenses, and custom licenses do not inspire any confidence (law ain't easy).
It's difficult to tell when people are internationally misleading others saying "open source" because many devs just say it to mean "you can see the code". Some would sincerely, without ill-intent, call Unreal Engine open source. Would certificate marks promote an understanding?
I love that they also designed some ways to save space. Most of us no longer live in a world where we print multiple times a week. Printers just sit around and take up space while they do nothing for months on end.
This thing is small, wall mountable, and you don’t need to store flat packed paper.
These folks should win a red dot design award for this. Really smart industrial design all around. They really solved a lot of different problems, not just the ink problem.
Does it still rat you out to the feds?
Oy vey.
That is not true even a little bit. Look at any inkjet paper under a microscope made after the mid 2000s.
Or a Canon if you can't afford a Brother.
Prints even without ink, and the software looks and behaves like it's from 1996 so it's ridiculously simple. It doesn't harass you or fill your PC with bloat—the software just hangs out quietly in the background and only pops up when you need to print to inform you of ink levels—it doesn't bother you with bullshit ever.
The only modern feature it has is network connectivity, which is honestly the only modern feature I need in a printer, so that I can print from my phone without having to boot up my PC first. And that's even simpler than printing from PC because you don't even need a driver. Just hit the Print option in Android and start printing.
For now : https://consumerrights.wiki/...
I have one also so I'm invested in how this plays out.
Yup. I'm on my second now because of an international relocation, but the first one is still going strong at my dad's. Bought that thing 14 years ago, was the first series that came with network enabled printing instead of USB (though it has a port).
As people on HN correctly pointed out, it's not fully open source as their license only permits them to manufacture parts for the printer
Open source is generally about the code, not the hardware, even less manufacturing. OSHW (hence the clarification even though a bit longer) is about the hardware and has specific requirements in order to get the label and ID, e.g https://certification.oshwa.org/de000008.html and process https://certification.oshwa.org/process.html
AFAIK there is no terms that means open source + OSHW but I'd love to learn if there is one and apologize in advance if I missed that.
Anyway as I'm interested in the project, which part is proprietary exactly? In theory as they sell via CrowdSupply https://www.crowdsupply.com/apply it should be both OSHW and open source but I didn't dig.
It states the code and files will be CC-NC licensed, which isn't open source.
Thanks, I just checked https://www.crowdsupply.com/... and its says "Open Printer will use the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license for all of its files, including electronics and mechanical design files, firmware code, and the bill of materials." so I don't think that's related to the source code but rather the resulting binary of the built firmware.
The latest CrowdSupply project I bought was the PGB-1 and they did realize their firmware source code https://github.com/... and as GPL3 so I assume they will clarify that before starting the crowd funding campaign. I don't think they can, even if they wanted to, have a CS project without releasing the source code.
Edit: to be safe I asked on the CS Discord for clarification.
So a closed open printer. I mean, is it at least, like, see-thru? I don't get the name.
Make something free for it then? The stuff is open and the license makes it so that it stays that way legally (though, in real life, it's different but that's another discussion) and any and all other contributions made to the project stays open source.
How they can say it's DRM free ink if they use non refillable HP cartridges? Ok, the built-in DRM isn't enforced, but HP has the worldwide exclusive in producing the cartridges, and its integrated printhead is literally the shittiest one you can find in the market. Yes, you can drill the tank and add ink, but that shitty printhead is not designed to last more than 1.5x the original life. And 100% of the "compatible" cartridges are refilled old ones, coming from ewaste, so they will break/clog even sooner.
If anyway they had to reverse engineer proprietary protocols to talk with the proprietary printhead, couldn't they use the printhead of a $50 Epson? Way more reliable and at least it has 4 colors instead of tricolor for black.
Ps: if I remember right on the box of HP cartridges there's some legal language like "licensed to be used only with approved HP® products", so can they sell a product that uses such cartridge?
@Wispy2891
This is the main problem. The #OpenPrinter project is cool, but depending on HP cartridges breaks it. Unless the team has a source of 'compatible' cartridges which are not refilled HPs. Then, it depends on the price and quality of those.
@ardi60
Someone's getting assassinated over this.
Nobody is because its not actually open source
So that's how they're still alive!
It does have some very unique features, like if you submit a print job that is larger than fifteen pages it goes on strike
Hey, thats just like my printer
It's a thing. Print shops use these to print different formats, usually for size > office paper. I checked on DDG and could easily find a supplier in my country for sizes the fit the OpenPrinter. Not sure if the paper roll is cheaper or more convenient, given that you have to order from specialized stores, but certainly it's a great idea.
The ink is DRM free, but proprietary paper rolls are available for the low low price of 3x the cost of a normal pack of A4
Will the Ferengi Alliance allow this?
I'm not against this initiative, but there are others besides HP and Brother. While maybe it's not self repairable (did not break down since I bought it years back so I have not yet tried) other than nozzle clogging which once happened but is an easy fix. It's hardly customizable which have not been a limitation so far. So i'm happy with my Epson ET printer that takes any ink I feed it.
So does my wifes Epson, works great after 8 years (and 5 in storage!!!). However, if something broke, it would be impossible to fix it. I know I'll be getting her this printer once the Epson breaks down.
Ecotanks are þe shizzle. I will allow þat þere could be someþing better, OSS, repairable, better quality materials... hell, color laser goes a long way. However, coming from cartridge printers to realizing þat you've stopped dreading printing because of þe subconscious awareness of how many dollars per page you're burning is... liberating.
Þ is a thorn. It makes a th sound, as in the or Thor, also written as þe and Þor. When using a printing press most typesetters did not have a thorn, so a y was used as a replacement, causing things like ye oldde, rather than the oldde (þe oldde).
This is great news!
If it looks like the example photos, it's a more elegant solution. I'm not fully sold on the paper rolls vs the standard reams of paper, but being able to package the printer like that looks amazing
I've used pen plotters that feed off a roll like that. One benefit is that you don't have restrictions on how long your print is --- you can make very large continuous images. That can be desirable for certain applications.
The pen plotter I used had a paper cutter that sliced the paper at the end of a print. I don't know if this thing slices at the end of each page or what.
kagis
Ah. Apparently it also can handle pre-cut sheets, and it additionally has a cutter for the roll:
The printer's paper, meanwhile, can be loaded as pre-cut sheets in letter, tabloid, A4, and A3 sizes, or as a continuous roll — with a built-in cutter knife able to trim the latter to the desired size following the completion of each page.
I dunno if they have a paper feeder, or if you have to insert pre-cut sheets one at a time, which I imagine would be obnoxious.
Not a fan of the paper roll but apart from that it looks great. If they ever sell this at a reasonable price, I'm buying one.
So necessary.
Plotters do (well, ones that feed off a roll rather than using a table). Common if you need to do larger prints.
Supported paper sizes include North American letter, tabloid, European A4, A3, 11-inch-wide rolls, and 27mm-wide rolls.
Here's 11-inch rolls:
Crazy this is a big deal for a mainstream outlet to cover. That's how regressive capitalism has been to consumers its supposed to help.
I love to see this. It is kinda weird to have to use rolls, but I guess the mechanical complexity of separating sheets and feeding them reliably is not fit for an MVP. I wonder how accurately the cut sheets would stack with individual sheets of another brand.
Renderite bullshit
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They will use CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Which means it's not open source, and no-one else can sell replacement cartridges, parts etc.
It might still be a good printer and enjoyed by some, but it really annoys me when companies mix these terms up, almost certainly deliberately.
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