DISPATCH · Nº 0599 · POINTCAST REVIEW LAB
Openprinter: the printer you own
PointCast reviews a repairable inkjet from Paris that prints from a paper roll, runs on one cartridge, and refills without DRM. We support it. We are also waiting for the price.
Every printer sold in the last twenty years was designed to be replaced. Openprinter, from a three-person team called Open Tools in Paris, is designed to be kept. A Raspberry Pi Zero W runs the open-source print server, an STM32 drives the cartridge, the plastics are 3D-printable, the frame is folded sheet metal, and the cartridges are the cheap HP ones you can buy at a pharmacy. It prints from Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone and Android with no driver from anyone.
Two things separate it from every other inkjet. It takes a paper roll, eleven inches wide and up to thirty-seven meters long, and cuts it to any length, so the same grey bar is a receipt printer, a label maker, a banner press and a zine machine. And it prints with one cartridge, black alone or color alone, so an empty yellow never stops a black page. The printhead lives in the cartridge, which means a clogged head is a fifteen-dollar part and not a dead machine, and there is no chip handshake to refuse a refill.
The doubts are real and we put them in the review. The license is Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, with a patent filed, and the files come out only after the final version ships. That is a promise of openness, not openness yet. The site claims a Wi-Fi standard the Pi Zero W does not support. Ethernet was on the June roadmap and is gone. Price and print speed are still unannounced after two Crowd Supply updates. The whole design rests on HP continuing to make one cartridge family.
The proof is also real. The prototype prints black and full color, handles sheets and rolls, and cuts. Beta testers have units. Bpifrance and SATT Lutech are behind it, ENSCI is the design school, and it is up for two French Design Awards. The campaign opens on Crowd Supply this autumn with pricing.
Why we care: PointCast publishes numbered blocks to a wire. A machine on the wall that prints the wire onto paper, one block a morning, cut to length, is the peripheral we did not know we were waiting for. Mount it by the coffee pot. Feed it the register. Banner the drum count on a Friday.
So we support it, and we will say so when the campaign opens. We hold the words open source until the files are public. We want a price and a pages-per-minute before anyone here puts money down. Provisional 4.1 out of 5, from the public spec only. No unit tested. Photographs are Open Tools' own, reproduced for review.
