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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how a market has also formed around offering services (often pay-per-use!) to reset the counter. I'm ambivalent about that; on the one hand, they did do some RE work to figure out how to reset the counter, but on the other hand, it seems just as predatory --- and I'm honestly surprised that there doesn't seem to be many who have sniffed the communications necessary to do the reset and published it freely yet. Here is one of the few projects I found; note the very short list of supported models:

https://github.com/lion-simba/reink

Likewise, custom firmware for printers is an equally underdeveloped niche.

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It would be cool that someone made a crowdsourced, open-hardware, open-source printer that people can self-service using refillable cartridges.

I think the overlap between people with the skills to do this and who care about printing is close to zero.

I suspect this is also why printer software/firmware is so terrible to begin with. The best, or even just decent developers are not working on printers.

I've long noted that NOBODY says they are proud to work on printer soft or hard ware.

You don't need a crowdsourced, open-source, open-hardware printer. Just buy a decent laser printer off-the-shelf with proprietary hardware and firmware. You can buy 3rd party cartridges (or even just toner to refill your existing carts) for dirt cheap on Ebay.

This works if you're just trying to solve the problem for yourself. The suggestion from the parent is if you're trying to help other people

I advise anyone who asked or commented about printers to buy laser printer instead of ink one.

Again, very very easy: tell them to buy a laser printer instead. Problem solved.

There is simply no valid reason to buy a consumer inkjet printer.

This is nonsense, cost of the printer is a very valid reason if you don't print very often. And what if you already bought the printer? Your solution involves trashing all existing printers, not very economical or ecological.

Laser printers can be bought for $100 now. Cost is not a valid reason.

Your solution involves getting an army of unpaid volunteers to take on a pet project that you think is important. That's not even realistic. If you think it's so important, I look forward to seeing your github page about it.

This would be a huge deal for more rare/advanced types of printing such as Piezography

Oddly it seems like a simpler problem than 3d printers? You could literally even expose a sheet of photo paper pretty well with a formlabs printer if the paper was UV sensitive.

You can buy something like that; they're just a few orders of magnitude more expensive than the majority of people would be willing to pay for a printer.

I'm referring to industrial machines using bulk ink (by the barrel), which come with full service literature and have parts availability. Unfortunately, besides the price, they are also relatively low resolution and designed for volume instead of print quality.

Modifying some printers to use an external ink waste bottle is possible, and using the counter reset software is easy too.

If there was demand I'm sure you could get that from China. But it comes at a price.

You're assuming there's a huge army of volunteers available to tackle these problems. Most likely, any open-source developers irritated by this crap simply don't buy Epson printers, knowing this about them, or better yet just don't buy inkjet printers. You can get laser printers rather cheaply these days, even with color, and avoid all the problems inherent in inkjets.

On the other hand, there seems to be no shortage of 3D printing projects; yet I find myself using a 2D printer far more often than I have ever had a need for a 3D one.

I would imagine it’s because it’s easy to buy a printer that works from someone other than Epson, Canon or HP.

When I got fed up of poor quality multi-megabyte driver downloads and cartridges that dry put after a month of inactivity I bought a Brother laser printer.

It prints from Windows, Linux and macOS without a driver download and it never dries out.

3D printers are much simpler than 2D printers, in terms of manufacturing the parts. Aside from the extruder area, the parts are simple mechanical off the shelf (or at least simple to manufacture) parts plus some machined or 3D printed interface parts. Most of the complex parts are not unique to a 3D printer and thus they are mass produced and cheap.

Many of the important parts in a laser or inkjet printer Have traits like tiny, precise, fluid-tight, even high voltage. And they are only made for printers, they aren’t commodity parts you can just buy. Just getting the parts to make one printer would probably cost 2 orders of magnitude more than buying a printer.

I’m also surprised why there isn’t any disruption in this space. If planned obsolescence in printers is so obvious and problematic, it would seem to me that creating a printer that doesn’t follow the dark patterns would just sell like hot cakes?

Kodak [1] tried that and gave up. Maybe it wasn't profitable enough.

[1] or some company using the Kodak name

Brother laser printer fit this description. At least when I bough one several years ago.

Epson actually has a line doing this, the Epson EcoTank series. They're excellent. The fact that Epson is playing both games clearly means that many consumers are not taking the long-term view here.

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