There was an update yesterday and it seems like they aim to launch this autumn.

If it delivers on its openness promise, I will probably get one with the roll to print A3

Not really. There are “open” printers but they’re generally super hacky. If you’re printing a lot I wouldn’t necessarily rely on that

Printers are actually tremendous feats of engineering and manufacturing. This is why almost (if not all) of the open printers reverse engineer an already made cartridge by HP or whatever, the print head is insanely difficult to create and essentially requires semiconductor lab conditions. Knowing how it works is a small piece compared to actually manufacturing it

Additionally printers are a patent hell situation. The reason we saw a sudden boom of 3d printers in like 2014 with reprap was because the stratasys patents for fff printing finally expired. Consumer 3d printing could’ve existed years earlier and the technology goes back to the 80s. Printers are similar except instead of broad patent for “inkjet printing” or whatever it’s literally thousands of patents about microfluidic transfer systems or whatever. This also speaks to the difficulty involved again; the 3d printer concept of squirting hot plastic through a nozzle is nothing in terms of complexity when compared to an inkjet printer.

Laser - it costs money because it saves money. (Paraphrasing a movie quote about copper plumbing).

https://hackaday.io/project/202990-open-printer

Open Printer is an open-source, repairable inkjet printer designed to outlive your laptop, dodge planned obsolescence.

Inkjet = printing ink more expensive than blood per liter

-> Laser = incredibly long lifetime for a cartridge (afaik unused ink, that doesn’t stick to the paper, gets filled back into the cartridge)

Color Laser printers have a much higher price point, but they last much longer and are not designed to use up Color’s for black printing like inkjet does.

Inkjet is one of the worst scams I know of.

Also inkjet use up ink without usage. Time alone will decrease % of each cartridge. My laser uses the same cartridge since like 2015, and got used before too I guess, because I was gifted the printer.

so a new toner cartridge fixed everything, got it off some local business that was selling off its surplus for $5 apiece. the thing is these models have the toner and drum in one cartridge; that used to be two things way back when I was using those things last.

Personally had a brother printer with issues similar but not nearly as severe. The toner cartridge had a rubber roller attached that had some gunk buildup that i carefully wiped away and then it came out printing fine

The toner is a very finely powdered abs plastic so you probably don't want to be using anything you plan on keping to wipe it.

Still using the original sample toner cartridge and drum like 10 years in

Could be the transfer belt which tends to be a very expensive item.

It could be a number of things. There are several rollers the page goes through when printing (including the drum it self). They each have a different diameter. You see that repeating horizontal line/zone across the page? That is telling you which roller it is. In service manuals it would tell you the circumference of each roller so you could narrow down your troubleshooting. See if you can get the service manual and if HP still publishes these numbers for your printer.

Seems like the wrong instance for this community as evident by the printer in question

I have the Canon PIXMA G550 now and I've tried printing with the iPad app, the Android app, on Linux and on Windows with official drivers installed and I don't see any differences in print quality.

My experience with my cannon ix6880 is that it "works" but the print quality on Linux has been really poor :(