Digital BW, The Print

Well said, Walker.



Bill Kennedy


-----Original Message-----
From: Walker Blackwell <forums@...>
To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 3:52 pm
Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Re: Is this a "conspiracy theory" ?


























    

            
            


      
      
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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