A Printer Printing onto Paper
twitter.comNo discussion, but this is from the Nikon Small World competition (4 points, yesterday) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50234796
The Nikon Small World in Motion competition, which only recently ended, was troubled by the prize winner being AI generated (3 points, 24 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49934521
> Dr Xu, an optical engineering researcher at the National University of Singapore, reportedly responded to the LinkedIn post. According to Nature, Dr Xu accepted that he had used an AI model to assist with post-processing but denied breaking the rules of the competition, which clearly state that “AI-generated videos are not permitted.”
> “It was applied afterwards to the reconstructed grayscale data to distinguish and color structures with similar morphology,” he wrote.
> However, Dr Xu’s messages on the LinkedIn post can’t be found as of today (October 1), and his LinkedIn profile now appears to have been deleted entirely.
> Scientists have repeatedly said that the issue could be resolved if Dr Xu shares his RAW grayscale video.
Fascinating images. The article linked by the parent has some info https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/meet-the-2026-winner...
His website is https://www.macrofying.com/ which is mostly links to the usual image/video sharing sites.
My Dad worked on some of the early HP inkjet printers and I remember him coming home and excitedly talking about tiny pockets in an array that they they figured out they could heat up until the ink boiled and squirted a little bit out. He talked about capillary action and surface tension and how it all meant they could make the whole thing with no moving parts at all. It was really fun to watch evolve.
Not sure if that's bubble jet or inkjet, but I think inkjets are very very cool!
For a deep dive of inkjets, there's a conference that posts talks: https://youtube.com/@theijc
And, a shallower dive of the complexities of inks is the great "engineerguy": https://youtu.be/-DckWNwE7R4
While this is fascinating, I am sitting here wondering if anything has improved in the Inkjet printer world.
Does it still clog up? There are many be one or two more refillable ink printers but are they good? Has printing quality improved?
Or are they still a bag of hurt we should all just hope for better and cheaper colour laser / LED printer.
> Does it still clog up?
Yes, even very high end printers like an Epson p5370 - https://luminous-landscape.com/the-epson-sc-p5370-printer/ "The printhead is the same relatively maintenance-light device that P900 owners (and predecessor P3880/3800 owners) really appreciate. These heads don’t clog much unless you leave the printer idle over long intervals and/or sit the printer in a very dry environment."
> Has printing quality improved?
Depends on the printer? A professional inkjet is extremely high quality these days.
>Or are they still a bag of hurt we should all just hope for better and cheaper colour laser / LED printer.
In a distant past I was tech support help desk person, which included poking the many color laser printers we had. They also actually broke all the time :(
I have the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 printer and have found it to be excellent for printing photos. It prints up to A3+ size (13" x 19") and ink costs are low since it uses tanks, which can be refilled using ink bottles, vs cartridges. The main caveat is that it uses dye inks which theoretically don't have the longevity of pigment inks, but for my purposes (family photos and photo club competitions) it doesn't matter.
Keith Cooper on YouTube has lots of informative videos about the ET-8550: https://www.youtube.com/@KeithCooper/search?query=8550
The key is using it, but…not too much…. I bought a inkjet printer and run maybe 10k pages through it, after i let it sit for 3 weeks it was basically unusable: clogged nozzles, misalignment. After working with riso printers for 10 years, I didnt feel the urge to fix it or have it repaired.
Sounds like someone needs to make an app that just prints out a calendar page or newspaper front page every morning to keep things flowing...
It's quite amazing technology. I wonder how they managed to make ink which dries fast on paper but doesn't dry and clog up the print head.
With all of the DRM nonsense around printers and authorized print cartridges, I'm kind of shocked the cartridge doesn't also have something that prevents printing if not in an authorized printer.
Not being part of a printer have anything to do with why the print looks bad? Like the thing he created to get the print head to spray ink isn't the same drivers and that's just a PoC to make the project possible? If this is just an extension cable from an actual printer, the quality looks janky to what I'd expect from modern ink jets.
There's been controllers for all sorts of common cartridges for a long time, a lot of low end UV printers all use a specific Epson cartridge that they run their own plumbing and electronics for. The end result of the device looks almost hand made a lot of the time, it's an XY plotter with a gigantic expensive print head on the end. https://www.amazon.com/mew/dp/B0FF93HB2W https://www.ebay.com/itm/397039456738
The printer is subsidized by the price of the cartridge. If you want to pay the hardware subsidy without getting any hardware, they're fine with that.
AI slop picture i swear. Inkjet heads essentially boils ink to jet (see?) it out of tiny nozzels. Never drips like that.
Yes i didn't bother reading the caption.
No, that is "bubble jet". Inkjets are proper resonant squirts, usually piezo driven.
And, for that reason, inkjets work with a much wider variety of liquids. Taken to the extreme, you have full color 3d prints with incredible precision: https://youtu.be/4IkvzMJihuY
If you scroll down a bit, you can see more realistic looking videos.