[rustcleaner]

Why no FOSS color pencil or pen plotter with robotic paper stack management (next sheet, and bonus: turn-over), ready to 3D print, flash onto pis, and forever replace the supply chain cumbersome ink and toner-based printing??

We can 3D print, why no easy common pencil/pen printer replacement plotters?!!

[mystified5016]

Plotters are really only good at drawing vector plots. Graphs, schematics, line drawing kind of stuff. Plotters are very bad at text.

I'd wager that something like 99% of all pages printed annually are exclusively text and/or raster images (photos).

Very close to nobody has a use for a plotter, and traditional printers can do 99.99% of the jobs a plotter can do. There's simply not one reason for the average consumer to use a plotter. If you're in an industry where you do actually need a plotter, they're available at industrial prices.

Plotters are cool, but they were only useful when the only other option was monochrome dot matrix. Even then they were extremely limited and not widely used.

If plotters can't compete with dot matrix there's no point even discussing whether they can compete with inkjet or laser.

[rcxdude]

Plotters don't really represent most people's use-cases. They're slow, and hard to use because they work with vector representations, so you can't really just print an arbitrary document and get acceptable results.

[lazide]

Edge case of an edge case I imagine.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a plotter in a store either.

That said, it wouldn’t be hard to convert any standard 3D printer into a plotter. Keep Z at 0, rubber band a marker to the side of the print head is probably all it would take.

[eternityforest]

It would take a long time to render photographs that way... If I'm printing something I either need 30 of something to hand out or I want a very high quality decoration on gloss paper.

[immibis]

Because you didn't create it yet.