Inkjet printing requires orders of magnitude more engineering expertise, materials science, industry experience and financial resources than most people imagine. That is the reason, open inkjet printers don't exist despite having been consumer products with the same drawbacks for more than forty years. That is why this is a pre-crowdfund landing page without a demonstrating a working prototype. I would like to be wrong, but I expect you to be waiting a long time. An inkjet printer is not a collection of off the shelf parts. It is a machine that operates at the edge of chemistry, fluid dynamics, and electro-mechanical design...you have to place tiny tiny drops of liquid ink on commodity wood pulp with precision under arbitrary environmental conditions, get that ink to dry on the wood pulp, but not in tank or nozzel, while producing acceptable color, durability, and ease of use. Also lawyers...there are patents.

- By rolling the paper, will it really stay flat after printing? - How easy / cheap will sourcing ink be?

(I myself don't 2D print enough that an ink based printer makes sense for me. Ink tends to dry, so for me a laser printer that can sit for months at a time makes more sense. I use the scanner as well as my 3D printer far more often.)

I wonder how they will handle the nonsense around yellow tracking dots[1] etc. Hopefully that doesn't become a problem.

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

TL;DR: I'm surprised this isn't a laser printer, as those are actually quite a bit easier to design and manufacture, especially if you can use a cheap, older, commonly available, remanufacturable toner cartridge.

So not open source.

> Open Printer is distributed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

> This means that everyone is free to use, share, and modify the project, provided they credit the original author, share derivatives under the same license, and do not use it for commercial purposes.

It's also not opensource yet, there's a vague mention of "when its ready" it'll be released.

Some previous discussion on the crowdfunding:

Inkjet printer with DRM-free ink will be launched via a crowdfunding campaign (2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45423404

To be less facetious though, this seems like a nice project (*), but I print so much less these days than in the past. I printed a lot of color stuff when I was in school; but these days I just settle for black/halftoning from a laser printer, for when I actually need something printed, and color on screen only.

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(*) - except perhaps for the NC restriction in the license.

This project seems like it's trying to address a similar market to the Ecotank. What assurances can the project team provide that OpenPrinter will have better reliability?