3 ms·

I also wouldn't underestimate the challenge of moving paper. I once spoke to someone who worked for Kodak (or a similar company - it was a long time ago) who sa

I also wouldn't underestimate the challenge of moving paper. I once spoke to someone who worked for Kodak (or a similar company - it was a long time ago) who said that they acquired another printer company purely because their paper moving technology was excellent and it would have taken years to develop an equivalent quality of engineering internally. This was before the present day race to the bottom in the printer market.

colinb 6y ago
If you haven't read it already, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams-persist https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams... is a lot of fun.
- aconst 6y ago
  A bit more than ten years ago I worked for Ricoh on an embedded software that was reporting the state of printer. Had a lot of fun trying to fold papers in different ways to try to trigger jams at different place of the printer to test that we were reporting jams accurately :)
- monoideism 6y ago
  Excellent long-form popular technical(ish) article; well worth the read.
detaro 6y ago
Yeah. printing on a single hand-fed sheet: probably "easy". Reliably going through a random pack of 500 pages, not so much. Something pen-plotters don't do (they typically want paper to be placed down for them, or work of a roll of paper), and the maybe 3D-printer equivalent of preparing the print bed and removing prints from it is a well-known source of problems and manual work.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  I think that's a key point you've made, which is that open-source 3D printers don't do the part that would make them useful for scale production (transitioning the work pieces off the print surface and preparing for the next run). Nobody would accept a 2D printer that took manual intervention every sheet.
wccrawford 6y ago
While I'm sure it's a challenge, after watching 3D printers evolve over the years, I've no doubt that random people will find unique and amazing ways to handle the problem.
- naavis 6y ago
  Paper printers have been around for ages though, and decades of R&D have been put into them. 3D printers have started to find a foothold relatively recently.
  - sleepybrett 6y ago
    The FDM 3d printer model took off ONLY because the patents around the FDM printing head expired.
Inhibit 6y ago
Having taken apart a color laserjet to repair the paper uptake I agree. That was a lot of engineering to make sure the paper moves through the path repeatably.

colinb 6y ago

If you haven't read it already, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams-persist https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams... is a lot of fun.

aconst 6y ago
A bit more than ten years ago I worked for Ricoh on an embedded software that was reporting the state of printer. Had a lot of fun trying to fold papers in different ways to try to trigger jams at different place of the printer to test that we were reporting jams accurately :)
monoideism 6y ago
Excellent long-form popular technical(ish) article; well worth the read.

detaro 6y ago

Yeah. printing on a single hand-fed sheet: probably "easy". Reliably going through a random pack of 500 pages, not so much. Something pen-plotters don't do (they typically want paper to be placed down for them, or work of a roll of paper), and the maybe 3D-printer equivalent of preparing the print bed and removing prints from it is a well-known source of problems and manual work.

InitialLastName 6y ago
I think that's a key point you've made, which is that open-source 3D printers don't do the part that would make them useful for scale production (transitioning the work pieces off the print surface and preparing for the next run). Nobody would accept a 2D printer that took manual intervention every sheet.

wccrawford 6y ago

While I'm sure it's a challenge, after watching 3D printers evolve over the years, I've no doubt that random people will find unique and amazing ways to handle the problem.

naavis 6y ago
Paper printers have been around for ages though, and decades of R&D have been put into them. 3D printers have started to find a foothold relatively recently.
- sleepybrett 6y ago
  The FDM 3d printer model took off ONLY because the patents around the FDM printing head expired.

Inhibit 6y ago

Having taken apart a color laserjet to repair the paper uptake I agree. That was a lot of engineering to make sure the paper moves through the path repeatably.