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Speaking of YC funding disruption where are the home printer startups? Is it just that unprofitable to even try? Or the hardware too difficult or tricky? Or th

Speaking of YC funding disruption where are the home printer startups? Is it just that unprofitable to even try? Or the hardware too difficult or tricky? Or the driver software? Seems like there are zero good alternatives for home printing. HP doing this stuff or making you subscribe to HP+. Brother offering basically zero support. Is epson or canon even competitive for a home printer?

pdonis 4y ago
> Brother offering basically zero support. I've had no problem finding Linux drivers for my Brother printers (or for their scanner components, since I've had all-in-ones for some time now), and they've never given me any problems that I needed any other support for.
- xattt 4y ago
  Brother offers some ancient driver blob for my HL2270 which requires installation of 32-but dependencies in order to run. Yes, there are IPP/Gutenprint options out there, but sometimes I feel like the image quality of the Brother driver is slightly more superior in imperceptible ways.
- antod 4y ago
  I don't have any printers at all any more, but yeah I always found that Brother was a good choice for a cheap but still somewhat reliable network capable duplex laser printer that was pretty easy to get working in Linux.
tiedieconderoga 4y ago
VCs tend to dislike manufacturing startups. It takes a lot of capital to get going, some time to get good yield & work out the early flaws, and there isn't much potential for a huge exit in 5-10 years. I'm more surprised that the printer market hasn't followed the security camera market, with lots of cheap and open options on markets like AliExpress that ship with phone-home firmware.
- packetlost 4y ago
  Printers are far more precise devices than you'd think. Building a camera from off the shelf Sony image sensors, slapping it in a plastic shell with a small ARM or RISC-V MCU is way easier of a design challenge than building a functioning printer.
  - wmf 4y ago
    Back in the 1990s a lot of laser printers used Canon engines so they only had to develop the RIP and the plastics. I wonder if that still exists.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
Been using Brother MFC printers for 20 years and all the software and technical documents were easily available on the website. And they are cheap enough that I would toss it if it ever broke early, but none ever have.
- Reptur 4y ago
  Yep, my Brother MFC Laserjet is 15 years old and still working great.
- leetrout 4y ago
  My brother mfc stopped working after 13 months and they offered zero support. Comments online said it was a power module. Someone on ebay sold me the wrong power board. The local brother service center wanted me to sign some kind of business support agreement to even talk about fixing it (it is just me at home). So I threw my $400 paperweight in the landfills electronics section and swore i would never buy another one.
wmf 4y ago
Just buy a tank printer or Brother or whatever.
fwlr 4y ago
Printers are very expensive to design, especially if you care about reliably not jamming. Printers are kind of expensive to manufacture. Ink is extremely cheap to manufacture. The printer industry charges a ton for ink and uses the enormous profits from charging for ink to cover the cost of design, and to heavily subsidize the price of printers. Competing with printer companies as a startup looks like this: you burn a bunch of VC money to get a working design, then you burn even more VC money to make and sell printers at a steep loss, and once you have established a market presence your investors look on in horror as you use it to sell a very cheap commodity product a few milliliters at a time.
- fwlr 4y ago
  The real answer for disrupting the printer industry is making and selling “cartridge refiller devices”. You sell the ink super cheap (hell, you could give it away for free, it’s that cheap). Your margin is on the refiller devices: the fact that printer companies have made hundreds of different cartridges with a myriad of anti-tamper mechanisms means you offer dozens of different devices, and whenever the big bad printer companies make their cartridges more hostile, your scrappy little company diligently reverse-engineers them and offers a new refiller device, and the customer is happy to buy it because he’s sticking it to the printer man.
  - Jabrov 4y ago
    And then you get sued
    - djcannabiz 4y ago
      Felony contempt of business model!
  - fy20 4y ago
    These were actually a thing in the 90s. As well as shops where you could take your empty cartridges, and they'd refill them for you.
- hakfoo 4y ago
SanjayMehta 4y ago
While Canon driver support is less than exemplary, Gutenprint drivers work well for me on macOS, especially for a photo printer. Worth checking out. https://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/p_Supported_Printers.php https://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/p_Supported_Printers.php
thehoff 4y ago
Laser printers! I have an old HP one (8-10 years old) that works and the laser cartridge lasts a really long time. It’s even Wi-Fi enabled which works most of the time (unplug and plug back in for the times it doesn’t gets it humming along again). Granted I only print probably 5-6 pages a month.

pdonis 4y ago

> Brother offering basically zero support. I've had no problem finding Linux drivers for my Brother printers (or for their scanner components, since I've had all-in-ones for some time now), and they've never given me any problems that I needed any other support for.

xattt 4y ago
Brother offers some ancient driver blob for my HL2270 which requires installation of 32-but dependencies in order to run. Yes, there are IPP/Gutenprint options out there, but sometimes I feel like the image quality of the Brother driver is slightly more superior in imperceptible ways.
antod 4y ago
I don't have any printers at all any more, but yeah I always found that Brother was a good choice for a cheap but still somewhat reliable network capable duplex laser printer that was pretty easy to get working in Linux.

tiedieconderoga 4y ago

VCs tend to dislike manufacturing startups. It takes a lot of capital to get going, some time to get good yield & work out the early flaws, and there isn't much potential for a huge exit in 5-10 years. I'm more surprised that the printer market hasn't followed the security camera market, with lots of cheap and open options on markets like AliExpress that ship with phone-home firmware.

packetlost 4y ago
Printers are far more precise devices than you'd think. Building a camera from off the shelf Sony image sensors, slapping it in a plastic shell with a small ARM or RISC-V MCU is way easier of a design challenge than building a functioning printer.
- wmf 4y ago
  Back in the 1990s a lot of laser printers used Canon engines so they only had to develop the RIP and the plastics. I wonder if that still exists.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

Been using Brother MFC printers for 20 years and all the software and technical documents were easily available on the website. And they are cheap enough that I would toss it if it ever broke early, but none ever have.

Reptur 4y ago
Yep, my Brother MFC Laserjet is 15 years old and still working great.
leetrout 4y ago
My brother mfc stopped working after 13 months and they offered zero support. Comments online said it was a power module. Someone on ebay sold me the wrong power board. The local brother service center wanted me to sign some kind of business support agreement to even talk about fixing it (it is just me at home). So I threw my $400 paperweight in the landfills electronics section and swore i would never buy another one.

wmf 4y ago

Just buy a tank printer or Brother or whatever.

fwlr 4y ago

Printers are very expensive to design, especially if you care about reliably not jamming. Printers are kind of expensive to manufacture. Ink is extremely cheap to manufacture. The printer industry charges a ton for ink and uses the enormous profits from charging for ink to cover the cost of design, and to heavily subsidize the price of printers. Competing with printer companies as a startup looks like this: you burn a bunch of VC money to get a working design, then you burn even more VC money to make and sell printers at a steep loss, and once you have established a market presence your investors look on in horror as you use it to sell a very cheap commodity product a few milliliters at a time.

fwlr 4y ago
The real answer for disrupting the printer industry is making and selling “cartridge refiller devices”. You sell the ink super cheap (hell, you could give it away for free, it’s that cheap). Your margin is on the refiller devices: the fact that printer companies have made hundreds of different cartridges with a myriad of anti-tamper mechanisms means you offer dozens of different devices, and whenever the big bad printer companies make their cartridges more hostile, your scrappy little company diligently reverse-engineers them and offers a new refiller device, and the customer is happy to buy it because he’s sticking it to the printer man.
- Jabrov 4y ago
  And then you get sued
  - djcannabiz 4y ago
    Felony contempt of business model!
- fy20 4y ago
  These were actually a thing in the 90s. As well as shops where you could take your empty cartridges, and they'd refill them for you.
hakfoo 4y ago

SanjayMehta 4y ago

While Canon driver support is less than exemplary, Gutenprint drivers work well for me on macOS, especially for a photo printer. Worth checking out. https://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/p_Supported_Printers.php https://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/p_Supported_Printers.php

thehoff 4y ago

Laser printers! I have an old HP one (8-10 years old) that works and the laser cartridge lasts a really long time. It’s even Wi-Fi enabled which works most of the time (unplug and plug back in for the times it doesn’t gets it humming along again). Granted I only print probably 5-6 pages a month.