[tweetle_beetle]

I also wouldn't underestimate the challenge of moving paper. I once spoke to someone who worked for Kodak (or a similar company - it was a long time ago) who said that they acquired another printer company purely because their paper moving technology was excellent and it would have taken years to develop an equivalent quality of engineering internally. This was before the present day race to the bottom in the printer market.

[colinb]

If you haven't read it already, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams... is a lot of fun.

[aconst]

A bit more than ten years ago I worked for Ricoh on an embedded software that was reporting the state of printer. Had a lot of fun trying to fold papers in different ways to try to trigger jams at different place of the printer to test that we were reporting jams accurately :)

[monoideism]

Excellent long-form popular technical(ish) article; well worth the read.

[detaro]

Yeah. printing on a single hand-fed sheet: probably "easy". Reliably going through a random pack of 500 pages, not so much.

Something pen-plotters don't do (they typically want paper to be placed down for them, or work of a roll of paper), and the maybe 3D-printer equivalent of preparing the print bed and removing prints from it is a well-known source of problems and manual work.

[InitialLastName]

I think that's a key point you've made, which is that open-source 3D printers don't do the part that would make them useful for scale production (transitioning the work pieces off the print surface and preparing for the next run).

Nobody would accept a 2D printer that took manual intervention every sheet.

[Inhibit]

Having taken apart a color laserjet to repair the paper uptake I agree. That was a lot of engineering to make sure the paper moves through the path repeatably.

[wccrawford]

While I'm sure it's a challenge, after watching 3D printers evolve over the years, I've no doubt that random people will find unique and amazing ways to handle the problem.

[naavis]

Paper printers have been around for ages though, and decades of R&D have been put into them. 3D printers have started to find a foothold relatively recently.

[sleepybrett]

The FDM 3d printer model took off ONLY because the patents around the FDM printing head expired.