[wccrawford]

There's nothing to disrupt. Anyone who wants to pay more initially and get cheaper ink/toner can do so. Most home users just go look for a super-cheap printer with a good name and buy it. They don't even do proper review checking.

And if you hate the price of ink cartridges, but still don't want toner, there are multiple printers from at least 2 manufacturers on the market that have ink bottles that you refill reservoirs instead of having cartridges. Canon and Epson both make them, and there are probably others that I didn't find. I think "megatank" was the search I ended up with to find some.

Sure, a few years back maybe someone could have disrupted the market... But it's already been done by the incumbents.

[chrisseaton]

> There's nothing to disrupt.

Can nobody do anything about the crunchy mechanics of printers? My printer goes through the most incredible warmup routine, running the motors seemingly at random or about a minute and then twists the paper through a maze of rollers. Can we not make these things more 'solid state'?

[tadfisher]

Photolithography could work. The trick is to avoid waste and keep speed up, which are both really, really good properties of the drum/roller setup of a normal LED printer. So you'd probably have to use photosensitive paper rolling over a dense row of LEDs (kind of a reverse scanner). Which is basically what an LED printer is, except the paper is electrostatically charged and runs through a fuser to adhere the attracted toner.