Every time this is brought up someone has to remind people that printers watermark whatever they print with a unique ID in barely readable type. That’s, for example, why they refuse to print something in black when yellow is low. And it’s a legal requirement.
Black and white printers can’t do that, but as I mentioned in another comnent, if you do have a color printer, add lots of yellow dots before you print it out.
That is only specific brands like HP with only specific models as well.
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots
Your own link says that as of 2017 assume all new printers print some form of tracking
Watch me buy a 1990s hunk of shit laser jet as big as my desk just to fuck with feds
Today my HP printer asked my for my GPS location, to allow me to scan a document. Like why? Why is it required to use a basic option?
HP wants to know your location
literally though
To sell your location to the highest bidder. Duh. So ethical.
Btw, that Nathan Fillion gif is from Castle and not Firefly.
Ostensibly, that’s because the app wants Bluetooth and/or WiFi access so it can connect to the printer. Because you can use WiFi and Bluetooth to determine location (based on large crowd sourced databases of these data points that have been geolocated), the OS has to ask for location permission as well, even if you just need to see WiFi and Bluetooth.
That being said, once they have this permission, I have 0 doubt they log the actual location as well…
Mozilla used to run a free service for this, and collected that data in the background using mobile Firefox. A replacement is https://beacondb.net/, which is still building enough location data to become useful. Services like this aren’t nefarious, they’re actually really important in getting a quick GPS lock on mobile. Phone hardware actually have pretty poor GPS receivers, but if you can determine an approximate location prior, you get much better results, especially once supplemented with inertial measurements and snapping to mapped roads.
HP printers are shit, I don’t want one even if you pay me. Buy a office-class B&W laser from Brother and never worry again.
Yeah, if you don’t print enough to justify a laser printer then you probably don’t need a printer at all. Just go to the library when you want to print something.
Only suckers buy inkjets.
I have a Brother laser printer that I got 25 years ago that I use so little it’s still on the promo cartridge and it works fine any time I need it.
Meanwhile, an ink jet my old job got a few years ago fatally clogged itself after just a few weeks of normal use.
I bought a brother color laser printer during lockdown, 4 years and it’s never had an issue, and I have yet to change the cartridges. I’ll never go back to inkjet.
Even when blocking third party cartridges, they are still infinitely better than all the bullshit HP is pulling.
Because NSA.
It’s wild to think about, but 3D filament extrusion printers are actually a lot more simple than ink/toner document printers. I think the age of printing - at least in home and small office settings - is coming to an end. Most people I know don’t have one and those that do can only think of “so I can print boarding passes” as a reason.
I am once again telling you about my old HP inkjet printer that has no internet connection, takes refills, the ink never dries out and it prints black and white without needing any color ink.
Printers peaked 15-20 years ago and I got lucky and bought one at the right time. The best part is when I buy new ink the money goes to someone who refills cartridges and none of it to HP.there is a near endless supply of brother laser printers at thrift stores for under 15 bucks. and they come with toner carts still in them.
the last one I got from goodwill is still going strong on the toner that came with it, and its been years.
and if the toner ever does wear out, hell, I could buy 3 more printers for what the toner would cost.
also bonus that brother printers work super good in linux, least headache i’ve ever had installing a printer.
It’s funny because anecdotally, the entirety of the FOSS movement was started because Richard Stallman was tilted that he had the know-how to fix the printer at the lab he worked at, but was not legally allowed to.
You’d think “Printers” would have been the first thing the FSF would have tried to create.
It does seem ironic that we have opensource 3d printers before 2d printers.
5-yo reddit thread lol - We should create an open source 2d printer
As someone who’s assembled a couple of FDM* 3D printers and disassembled a number of 2D printers, the latter is usually a lot more complicated mechanically (varies a lot by features provided, like double-sided print).
I’ve had the same hp laserjet pro printer, just checked Amazon, since March 2015. It has worked without issue through various windows, iOS, and Linux systems. Using native drivers, cups, and the web interface on my lan. I would argue it is one of the most reliable and dependable devices I’ve owned and has maintained compatibility with anything and everything without requiring anything be done to it other than I’m on my third cartridge that I purchased a pack of 2 of for $26.98 in October of 2021 which still seem to sell for $25… I may just order another pack.
LxTek Compatible Toner Cartridge 83A Replacement for HP 83A CF283A Compatible with Laserjet Pro MFP M125nw M201dw M225dw M201n M125a M127fn M127fw, 2 Black
I don’t understand the persistent whining about printers. If you need color or graphics send them to CVS or some shit to have them printed on a professional quality printer and paper for less than it used to cost to develop a roll of film or print it off at work on a high end laser color printer. I can’t believe people still piss their money away on throw away ink jet printers. I know otherwise seemingly intelligent people that can’t be swayed that they are actually throwing money away because “I got a new printer for less than the ink cost!!!”, yeah dumbass, you are generating e-waste and getting cartridges with barely any ink in them, you didn’t decode the matrix.
Printers are of exceptional quality in my experience.
Edit: I also spent just under two years navigating up the system admin ranks as a printer admin and managed almost 300 laser printers supporting over 3,000 users and I’m fairly certain most issues admins create for themselves, or had a prior admin create for them, because they aren’t willing to really understand how to setup a print server and just make it work asap. Once the server(s) and printers are setup and configured correctly the only maintenance any of those printers required was after well over 100k pages.
Yes please. Printers are so annoying and it’s a racket.
An open source 2d printer is possible but will probably never happen
The print head is incredibly complex, the drivers and communications to talk to printers are all closed source, and unlike 3d printing the level of quality people are accustomed to is covered by patents for another 20-30 years
I want the scanner part.
You can buy dedicates scanners who don’t fuck with you.
CANON PIXMA MG 2440 which I have also has full Linux support OOB without the bullshit, either print or scan. But it’s an old boy now, it can’t do the kewl ayy oo tee bullshit like LAN printing
Canon bricked 3 printers I owned. I will not own another canon. Love their cameras though.
How tf did canon brick them
My shit is so ancient it has no idea what an “Internet” is. I’d like to see canon touch this mfer lol
I had a printer that I used that was offline. It was accidentally put online and it bricked. My day had a printer that bricked when it became a little older. He bought the same one and it bricked immediately. It’s planned obsolescence on the last 2.
If your printer needs internet, shoot it
IANAL but I think patents don’t necessarily mean open source isn’t possible.
That is correct but it means it’s a lot of work for not much benefit
3d printing took off in 2009 when the stratasys patents on FDM expired. You can literally look at the history of consumer 3d printing and it’s basically nothing nothing nothing nothing 2009 reprap makerbot prusa. Similarly when SLA patents expired we suddenly got formlabs and eventually cheap resin printers.
Why reinvent the wheel? If a patent is about to expire just wait and do that. If it’s not and you truly have a novel idea for how to achieve the function that does not infringe on any patents, most people would end up trying to sell it (assuming they have the skill to bring it to market). Our culture is ruthless and requires capital to survive so I don’t necessarily fault someone for trying to secure the bag, though I wish they would at least do it in a way that wasn’t totally gross
That’s just it, most people don’t mind paying for a printer or ink. It’s the way they charge insane prices for ink, and then make you do backflips to get a scan or one page out.
Bring back Dot Matrix!!
She was pretty hot in ReBoot
Or use plotters. These are the same X-Y setup as a 3D printer, where you use a pen instead of an extrusion module. There are a bunch of DIY projects for this. But now you’re talking about minutes per page, not pages per minute.
Plotters are so much slower than printers, but having one write your document out for you would be so cool. This is one reason I would buy a Cricut.
The print head is not complex, the printer companies just make it out to be. Essentially it’s just a funnel to transfer ink onto paper. All that’s needed is a needle to deliver the ink to the paper, or puncture the top layer to inject the ink to it. Apply heat to set the ink afterward. Moving the head over the paper and moving the rollers for the paper to move is already software which is known to the 3d printing community. The big trick is finding a system which doesn’t hit some backward patent and getting a prototype made. That largely takes time and money.
Most modern printers aren’t what you describe though, they’re either a piezo that flexes with electricity to create pressure on the ink chamber and release a precise droplet of ink or they are a thermal design where a resistor heats inside the ink chamber to create pressure that forces ink out of the nozzle and subsequently draws more ink into the chamber as it cools. Heat is used here to eject the ink but heat is not used to set the ink in either process, that is done with evaporation and absorption (which is why printing a full page image can smear).
It’s not some big secret as you’ve said, the patents are openly available, but as you’ve said they’re off limits even for noncommercial use because America is stupid. It’s true that they’re not mystical and impossible to recreate but they’re definitely harder to replicate than a heat sink with a tube cut in it, a heat break, a cartridge heater, and a metal nozzle with a (typically) 0.4mm hole
The print head in most inkjet printers (at least non commercial ones) has no moving parts (unless you count the piezo flexing). Dot matrix used needles but why recreate that unless you specifically want that for the vibes or something?
Don’t overengineer the prototype. Make it simple and efficient as a jumping off platform to lead to further developments down the road. Any open printer project doesn’t have to start with the technology the proprietary models have. They just have to be proof-of-concept that it’s doable. Once that’s proven, further developments can be made down the line. Dot matrix is easy to create and cheap to produce compared to the overengineered systems proprietary models use nowadays and it would work as a stepping stone toward that further development.
That makes sense. If you’re going that route though you should be fairly safe patent wise I would think? Most of the dot matrix patents, if not all, have to be expired by now?
I’m not a lawyer, but I would expect so.
You would still need to explore patents. Just because patents exist, doesn’t mean they are in use. I would not be surprised to find out that a company like HP would hunt down and buy any patents that could interfere with its profits just to prevent others from using them.
Why would you need to worry about patents on something that is free and open source
Patent infringement is about use, not price
It’s total bullshit that stifles innovation but such is life in the USA. At least the period isn’t completely obscene like copyright
the drivers and communications to talk to printers are all closed source
That hasn’t stopped CUPS
CUPS works great when it does work but it can be a real pain in the ass. That said if you build the printer around it it would probably work pretty well
CUPS is a blessing and a curse. Even when it works perfectly, fingers are crossed the next time.
just today I read that microsoft will stop accepting any new printer drivers. If new printers are to work, they must support mopria and IPP.
That should eventually have positive side effects for us linux users
If I remember correctly, the restriction is that Microsoft will no longer distribute new print drivers via Windows Update. But I agree that moving to a common standard will help everyone’s print experience immensely. Trying to deal with HPs drivers is nightmare fuel.
US parents expire after 20 years.
Damn, no wonder the kids ain’t alright.
obscenely expensive birth, no parental leave, no childcare support… it’s a wonder they last that long.
Most of my printing needs don’t even require “near letter quality”. I can deal with a modern equivalent to a 9-pin printer and just send out final versions for professional printing.
Are you saying the very concept of high resolution 2d printing is patented? Or that the way so and so manufacturer does it is patented?
The latter. Someone could create a novel means of transferring ink onto paper in a way that results in high resolution images and give it to the world for free i suppose
Don’t need to be novel, everything from 2005 and older is no longer under patent.
My solution is to do all my printing at the library. All the problems related to keeping my ink cartridge ready are now their problem.
We would absolutely love an actual open source printer you can get off the shelf parts and maybe some 3d printing and just use normal liquid ink rather than some inkjet cartridges. And no not some janky 3D printer set up to be a make shift printer, like an actual put the paper in and stuff comes out kind of printer. Prompts for a scanner and copier combo
isn’t there like a big difference between a printer and a 3d printer? are you really expecting one device to do both?
There have been scattered hobbyist takes on turning a 3D printer into a plotter (a 2D vector-based type of printer) because the moving around in two dimensions a 3D printer does for each layer is the exact thing a plotter would do with a pen on a sheet of paper. Here’s one such project.
ah thanks for clarifying
They are nothing alike and require wildly different mechanical systems.
This is the best I can find an open source printers, It uses an ancient HP black cartridge that’s still in production which provides you the heads. The cartridge is pretty cheap.
https://www.instructables.com/Make-a-Handheld-InkJet-Printer-Print-on-ANY-Surfac/
The problem is the ink they use brings more to the table than just being expensive. Unless you intend on using a ballpoint pen plotter or you’re going back to Dot matrix, you can’t just deliver regular ink to a page. The piezo-electric nozzles need a very specific density and viscosity, It needs to dry at just exactly the right time and be able to be cleaned off the nozzle with the lightest wipe. The ink and the nozzles have 50 years of experience behind them.
Making a head go across the page with precision and high resolution is a very well solved problem, couple of steppers some electronics Legos and a 5-minute Google search you could get that part going. But you’re going to have to use somebody’s printheads and ink because that’s well beyond DIY scope.
Found one after a minute of looking: https://hackaday.io/project/167446-diy-inkjet-printer
Here you go grandma! Your new printer!
It works, but not at the level most people expect. Also, the maintenance seems a bit much still.
That’s very cool but not exactly practical for everyday use.
It makes sense if you know about the identifying marks printers add to any output.
I thought I’ve come across some crazy conspiracy when I first found this.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
a digital watermark which many color laser printers and photocopiers produce on every printed page that identifies the specific device that was used
Its crazy how we now have 3D printers that consistently work every time with very little fuss but 2D printers are somehow still shit.
That’s because it’s a lot harder to feed paper and put multicolored tiny dots on it than it is to move a nozzle around and feed a comparatively large squirt of filament.
But we’ve had 2D printers for longer? That would imply that its a simpler task, not having to deal with temperature and layer adhesion and all.
Things do not always get implemented in complexity order. A lot of the time it’s dictated by whether one has both a use-case and the means to implement it, and businesses have had money and a need to put things on paper for quite a while.
That being said, 3D printing is difficult and complicated, in software. Mechanically it’s quite simple. A DIY-er can easily copy complicated software to use a 3D printer, but you can’t easily copy complicated mechanical parts to make a 2D printer.
Even worse was my Epson MFP.
Me: Want to scan a page
Printer: No can do
Me: But why?
Printer: I’m outta yellow ink.
Me: How’s that relevant to the task of scanning something?
Printer: 🖕🖕It took a dive from my balcony right into the dumpster bin.
How else will the police track your documents back to you without invisible fingerprints.
If you’ve got a printer that does that, add lots of yellow dots to your document before printing it.
The dots that are used for ID are ridiculously small tho
They are, but by definition, the printer can print them. If your on linux or Mac it looks like it might be possible to write a filter to add to CUPS that would do it for every print.
Omg, this made me chuckle in the best way. This is the most accurate comic I’ve seen in a bit. When I got an IT job, printers were so alien to me because I hadn’t had one in many years. They’re stupid and I hate them, but what are you gonna do.
As someone who spent most of my early IT years dealing with printers, they never get any less alien. Also, they are stupid and I hate them.
