An Inkjet Printer I Can Finally Recommend

Every printer I’ve owned for the past twenty-five years has been a laser. Each time I shopped for a new one I also looked at inkjets, at what their cartridges cost and whether they could be refilled, and each time the answer sent me back to toner. OpenPrinter, an open hardware inkjet from Open Tools in Paris that is about to launch on Crowd Supply, is the first one I’d recommend to someone who prints in colour. I don’t know the team and get nothing from this post; I just want it to exist.

Cartridge prices weren’t my only reason. I print when I have to and rarely more, and an inkjet cartridge left alone for a couple of months tends to clog, while a toner cartridge sits in my printer for years and still prints. OpenPrinter doesn’t change that, so I’ll stay with laser for my own documents, but when someone tells me they need an inkjet, this is the one I’ll point them to.

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What it does differently

OpenPrinter takes the standard HP 63 cartridge in the US and the HP 302 in Europe, black, colour or both, and you can refill them; nothing in the printer checks whose ink is inside. It prints through CUPS, the printing system macOS and most Linux distributions use, and the campaign lists Windows, Android and iPhone alongside them, so there’s no proprietary driver that can stop being updated. Inside are a Raspberry Pi Zero W and an STM32 board for the cartridges, with a small screen and a jog wheel on the outside, and at 50 by 10 by 11 centimetres it’s small enough to keep on a shelf. Open Tools says it “can be assembled, customized, and repaired to extend its life”, and publishes the electronics, the mechanical design, the firmware and the bill of materials, so a broken part is something you can look up and replace.

Sheets and rolls

It prints on ordinary sheets up to A3 in Europe or tabloid in the US, and on roll paper 297 mm or 11 inches wide, which a built-in cutter cuts to length. The campaign mentions banners and strips. My own use would be smaller: my kids like a colouring roll now and then, a colouring page printed on one long sheet, and I’d happily build an OpenPrinter for that alone. Long prints also open up small creative and business work, since what you print on it is yours to sell.

The licence and the launch

Everything Open Tools publishes is under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. You may study, modify and share the design as long as you credit Open Tools, share your changes under the same licence and don’t use it commercially. The non-commercial condition is why it isn’t open source in the strict sense, and it means building OpenPrinters from the published files to sell needs Open Tools’ permission. For anyone who wants one printer they can own, repair and refill, it changes nothing.

The campaign hasn’t launched yet, and there’s no price or shipping date so far. The campaign page lets you sign up to hear when it goes live. If you print in colour, that’s where I’d start.