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I want a good printer made by Makers
Jan. 28th, 2010 11:47 amPrinters suck.
I'm hardly alone in this opinion either. From the "PC LOAD LETTER" scenes in Office Space, to the recent web comic The Oatmeal: Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell To Make Us Miserable to my rants back in my sysadmin days about how that "have one cursed button that doesn't do anything!".
Back in the day, they were big loud monstrosities that were always shaking themselves apart, to today, where the paper handling is actually decently good, but we got screwed by the manufacturers who DRM their ink, install 8 gigs of bloatware on our machines, have horrible interfaces, and build pieces of plastic crap that fall apart after just a ream or two.
Printers suck, we all know they suck, and the people who design and sell printers have been making them worse.
I've started hoping for the rising Maker Culture to solve this problem.
Especially the first time I saw things like the Steampunk Workshop's PC, I had this vision of someone making a modern network SoHo printer with brass gears.
Just a printer. A basic printer. 300dpi and black only would be fine. That took bog standard PostScript, with no special drivers, no bloatware, no "install CD". Contained a very simple straightforward print server (maybe just a little embedded linux box). Brass gears, and a solid body, maybe made of wood, iron, brass, glass. (Why try to shave weight? It's a printer!) Proper real rubber rollers. Uses big bottles of cheap ink. Or maybe blocks of crayon wax.
It looks like some other people are having the same vision:
http://hackaday.com/2010/01/26/why-aren
http://openprinter.wikia.com/
I would so pay a couple of hundred dollars for one like I just described.
I'm hardly alone in this opinion either. From the "PC LOAD LETTER" scenes in Office Space, to the recent web comic The Oatmeal: Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell To Make Us Miserable to my rants back in my sysadmin days about how that "have one cursed button that doesn't do anything!".
Back in the day, they were big loud monstrosities that were always shaking themselves apart, to today, where the paper handling is actually decently good, but we got screwed by the manufacturers who DRM their ink, install 8 gigs of bloatware on our machines, have horrible interfaces, and build pieces of plastic crap that fall apart after just a ream or two.
Printers suck, we all know they suck, and the people who design and sell printers have been making them worse.
I've started hoping for the rising Maker Culture to solve this problem.
Especially the first time I saw things like the Steampunk Workshop's PC, I had this vision of someone making a modern network SoHo printer with brass gears.
Just a printer. A basic printer. 300dpi and black only would be fine. That took bog standard PostScript, with no special drivers, no bloatware, no "install CD". Contained a very simple straightforward print server (maybe just a little embedded linux box). Brass gears, and a solid body, maybe made of wood, iron, brass, glass. (Why try to shave weight? It's a printer!) Proper real rubber rollers. Uses big bottles of cheap ink. Or maybe blocks of crayon wax.
It looks like some other people are having the same vision:
http://hackaday.com/2010/01/26/why-aren
http://openprinter.wikia.com/
I would so pay a couple of hundred dollars for one like I just described.
