A Printer Printing onto Paper | Hacker News Reader

A Printer Printing onto Paper

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193 pointsMrBuddyCasino49 comments

My Dad worked on some of the early HP inkjet printers and I remember him coming home and excitedly talking about tiny pockets in an array that they they figured out they could heat up until the ink boiled and squirted a little bit out. He talked about capillary action and surface tension and how it all meant they could make the whole thing with no moving parts at all. It was really fun to watch evolve.

Super cool :)

Quite cool that the solution was basically to let physics do most of the work instead of adding more mechanical complexity

No discussion, but this is from the Nikon Small World competition (4 points, yesterday) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50234796

The Nikon Small World in Motion competition, which only recently ended, was troubled by the prize winner being AI generated (3 points, 24 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49934521

Fascinating images. The article linked by the parent has some info https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/meet-the-2026-winner...

His website is https://www.macrofying.com/ which is mostly links to the usual image/video sharing sites.

> Dr Xu, an optical engineering researcher at the National University of Singapore, reportedly responded to the LinkedIn post. According to Nature, Dr Xu accepted that he had used an AI model to assist with post-processing but denied breaking the rules of the competition, which clearly state that “AI-generated videos are not permitted.”

> “It was applied afterwards to the reconstructed grayscale data to distinguish and color structures with similar morphology,” he wrote.

> However, Dr Xu’s messages on the LinkedIn post can’t be found as of today (October 1), and his LinkedIn profile now appears to have been deleted entirely.

> Scientists have repeatedly said that the issue could be resolved if Dr Xu shares his RAW grayscale video.

Ouch once you go dark really seems like you're guilty. NUS will not be happy with this guy if he can't come clean.

It’s ambiguous wording. To me, his work is “clearly” NOT “AI-generated”, and if only based on that, he’s right.

The video has structures fading in and out of existence, which is a pretty typical artefact found in many AI video models.

That's not quite enough to prove it was AI in itself. But when combined with the fact he was unable produce the original raw grayscale video and how he deleting his linkedin... basically confirmed to be AI.

https://xxcancel.com/macrofying/status/2112904628509528219

Not sure if that's bubble jet or inkjet, but I think inkjets are very very cool!

For a deep dive of inkjets, there's a conference that posts talks: https://youtube.com/@theijc

And, a shallower dive of the complexities of inks is the great "engineerguy": https://youtu.be/-DckWNwE7R4

I initiated some small talk with a guy at a security conference once. Turned out he was an ink DRM expert at one of the big companies.

Interesting convo but I didn’t invite him to drinks later that evening.

Hah! Some jobs just make you a social pariah no matter how interesting.

While this is fascinating, I am sitting here wondering if anything has improved in the Inkjet printer world.

Does it still clog up? There are many be one or two more refillable ink printers but are they good? Has printing quality improved?

Or are they still a bag of hurt we should all just hope for better and cheaper colour laser / LED printer.

I have the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 printer and have found it to be excellent for printing photos. It prints up to A3+ size (13" x 19") and ink costs are low since it uses tanks, which can be refilled using ink bottles, vs cartridges. The main caveat is that it uses dye inks which theoretically don't have the longevity of pigment inks, but for my purposes (family photos and photo club competitions) it doesn't matter.

Keith Cooper on YouTube has lots of informative videos about the ET-8550: https://www.youtube.com/@KeithCooper/search?query=8550

The key is using it, but…not too much…. I bought a inkjet printer and run maybe 10k pages through it, after i let it sit for 3 weeks it was basically unusable: clogged nozzles, misalignment. After working with riso printers for 10 years, I didnt feel the urge to fix it or have it repaired.

Sounds like someone needs to make an app that just prints out a calendar page or newspaper front page every morning to keep things flowing...

My bro has a (weekly?) cron job to print a (test?) page, to prevent inkjet heads from drying out.

You'd think that after all this time, it'd be a built-in feature.

I like it. Screensavers but for printers. After all, the original purpose of a screensaver is to preserve the output device's health when the system is idle.

If it were built-in, you could even minimize the wasted ink and paper. Just print a single line every few days or something and keep the same sheet of paper in place for weeks or months and add to it instead of using a new sheet of paper. The ink has plenty of time to dry, so you can probably print over the same areas repeatedly.

Alternatively, you could implement it in the driver, but there's more opportunity for things to go wrong if you restart the computer, lose the connection, or have multiple computers sharing a printer.

I've long had an idea that I should get my home automation to just print _something_ every couple of weeks to stop it clogging up.

It was recently fully clogged (Epson EcoTank) and I managed to get it back to fully printing after about 10 rounds of head cleaning, so it's not a huge deal, but how many home printers are really printing regularly these days.

Ours gets used maybe once per quarter, and I actively encourage the kids to just photocopy, in colour, random stuff whenever they want to be sure it doesn't just clog up.

> I should get my home automation to just print _something_ every couple of weeks

Or a cron job if you run the HA server on something that looks like Unix.

Or an esp32 powered through the printers usb port? Mmmmmm

> Does it still clog up?

Yes, even very high end printers like an Epson p5370 - https://luminous-landscape.com/the-epson-sc-p5370-printer/ "The printhead is the same relatively maintenance-light device that P900 owners (and predecessor P3880/3800 owners) really appreciate. These heads don’t clog much unless you leave the printer idle over long intervals and/or sit the printer in a very dry environment."

> Has printing quality improved?

Depends on the printer? A professional inkjet is extremely high quality these days.

>Or are they still a bag of hurt we should all just hope for better and cheaper colour laser / LED printer.

In a distant past I was tech support help desk person, which included poking the many color laser printers we had. They also actually broke all the time :(

I used to have to manage color laser at work. Really expensive to run, powder fucking everywhere, and yes usually broken after a year.

After 3 printers it was not hard to persuade them to go B&W

Same. Fought with a Brother color laser at work that kept eating drums, fusers, transfer belts and cartridges even though we never printed much color. I feel all the mechanics needed to drag a page through four toner stations is the achilles heel of those machines. Switched to a B&W Xerox and so far its been fine for the half year we have ran it.

The B&W we had afterwards has run for about 10 years without any hitches or even basic maintenance.

The technology has improved quite a bit. The experience of owning one? That's a different story

I have an Epson XP-2205. It has clogged up and, unless I figure out how to unclog it, I will soon no longer have an Epson XP-2205. I use it under Linux, where support is underwhelming. The scanner works in one account but not on another (same computer).

On that front things look the same they always did.

The way they captured the actual spray whilst printing was really clever.

The print head is in a fixed location, as is the camera. The paper is moved under the print head. BUT! the clever bit is having the printhead driven by the rotatry encoder attached to the moveable platform

This means that the head is always in focus, and perfectly lit, plus you can experiment with speed trivially.

I have an HP Photosmart Plus B210 inkjet printer I bought in 2010. I print perhaps 1 page every two months. Quality is excellent — with the caveats that 1) It takes a LONG time — 1-2 minutes — to cycle through its Willy Wonka noises and sounds and spit out the page, and 2) the first couple pages are warm-ups of a sort, with faint ink.

Very cool!

Does anyone know what happens when the printer leaves gaps in a certain area of the page but prints fine otherwise?

And then we have to go to the maintenance menu to hopefully fix it?

Usually either the ink is running out and it's no longer continuously flowing to the jets; or the print head has dried ink stuck to it and needs cleaning.

That's awesome. With everything being digital though, I wonder who are the main consumers for personal home printers. Aside from TTRPG players I suppose.

We have a Brother laser ("just get this one, it's fine") and probably use it 4 or 5 times a week. UPS and other postal labels. To-do/checklists for kids. Sewing templates. Kids' homework for the one teacher who's not on Google Classroom. It's really in kind of constant use.

It's quite amazing technology. I wonder how they managed to make ink which dries fast on paper but doesn't dry and clog up the print head.

I love seeing everyday technology at this scale

With all of the DRM nonsense around printers and authorized print cartridges, I'm kind of shocked the cartridge doesn't also have something that prevents printing if not in an authorized printer.

Not being part of a printer have anything to do with why the print looks bad? Like the thing he created to get the print head to spray ink isn't the same drivers and that's just a PoC to make the project possible? If this is just an extension cable from an actual printer, the quality looks janky to what I'd expect from modern ink jets.

There's been controllers for all sorts of common cartridges for a long time, a lot of low end UV printers all use a specific Epson cartridge that they run their own plumbing and electronics for. The end result of the device looks almost hand made a lot of the time, it's an XY plotter with a gigantic expensive print head on the end. https://www.amazon.com/mew/dp/B0FF93HB2W https://www.ebay.com/itm/397039456738

The printer is subsidized by the price of the cartridge. If you want to pay the hardware subsidy without getting any hardware, they're fine with that.

cool

AI slop picture i swear. Inkjet heads essentially boils ink to jet (see?) it out of tiny nozzels. Never drips like that.

Yes i didn't bother reading the caption.

If you scroll down a bit, you can see more realistic looking videos.

No, that is "bubble jet". Inkjets are proper resonant squirts, usually piezo driven.

And, for that reason, inkjets work with a much wider variety of liquids. Taken to the extreme, you have full color 3d prints with incredible precision: https://youtu.be/4IkvzMJihuY

The Epson Stylus 440 (640?) we had in the family when I was a child was the first time I encountered this piezoelectric effect in technology. Back then you'd get all these paper manuals (or at least we did in India).

I think the little pictures they drew were quite descriptive:

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Screenshot_-_Epson_Tech...

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Screenshot_-_Epson_Manu...

Boy, there was so little content in those days. You didn't have the whole Internet so we used to actually read manuals for entertainment hahaha.

Thank you for your link. That's a sick resin printer from Mimaki. How cool that they started out as a 2D printer company and decided to just layer things up!

> first time I encountered this piezoelectric effect in technology

I suspect you encountered a piezo speaker [1] before a printer. ;)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectric_speaker

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