Digital BW, The Print

It's funny how throughout history the only truly massive spurts of  
innovation came coupled with a culture of openness, sharing, and a  
general lack of monetary and business thought. Tesla and electricity,  
the internet, etc.

If only this was true in the printing world. We would have epson 11880- 
type heads in Roland-quality printers with ink-systems derived from  
the medical industry and onboard linux boxes (for the controllers)  
running open-source but with millions of public dollars going to  
advanced head technology and LUT tuning.

Imagine if Epson screening was open-source. Imagine how far that would  
propel the print industry if we widened the thinking from 20 engineers  
at Epson Inc. to 20,000.

Imagine if we had a hardware product like the Eric Blossom's boards  
for software-defined GNU radio with the HIGHEST quality open source  
driver in the world that could print any width we built it and take  
any paper we threw at it. (And imaging if it was a flat-table printer,  
no paper bending, just suction under the print head.)

Its time for some brilliant mechanical/robotic engineers to step up  
and build the starting blocks of such a system. If we did this, the  
printing world would change for the better and forever. Open source  
modularized hardware is were we must head. We have been stalled at the  
margins technically for years (in this country) in a controlled  
upgrade pattern while big companies with lots of patents suck our  
wallets dry.

It started in the 80s with refrigerators and now it's everywhere. All  
epson has to do each year is add a channel and some nozzles, flip  
their magenta ink from more-magenta to more-red and back, mess with  
their cartridge pressure, and call it "technically improved." We all  
just sprint to get the new printer because our old ones have crappy  
issues that epson surely new about (3800 rollers, 9600 inkline  
pressure, o-rings, CF motor errors, vacuum clogs, etc) but decided to  
only fix one upgrade at a time in order to maximize profit and  
oversell the public.

Apple recently TOOK OUT the firewire port from the new MacBooks  
because they realized you could do Final Cut pro on a cheap MacBook  
just as well as on the MacBook pros. While this was an obvious thing,  
the behind the scenes "planned degrading" is much larger. We must  
break that business cycle. It should be illegal and is hurting our  
economy. If Cone can re-engineer color ink for epsons with a few  
chemists and some hutzpa to the point where we don't even need to re- 
profile our papers, Epson can surely build a printer that does not  
clog . . . . ever. It's in the hardware. Not the ink.

Walker

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