Most printer companies make their money off of the ink/toner for consumer products. The printers themselves are usually close to break even prices. That doesn't leave much room for open source competitors.
Just because of the scam you mention. EVERYONE complains about their bullshit low quality home printer with super expensive ink. Yet nothing is being done about it.
Printers are complex mechanical devices. And people want them cheap as possible. I don't think there is big enough market for open source printer that would cost x-times more.
Someone is likely making good industrial quality ones, now finding those and selling them on that point is something that should be solved...
Many of these printers don't work well on Free OSes unfortunately. Or require binary blobs (looking at you Canon) that are barely maintained piece of software cobbled together...
Why don't we have a common interface for printers. Something you could just push a simple pre-processed postscript or even bitmap. And then the device would do the stuff it needs to print it. Have basic set of options in there, page size, duplex, etc...
They likely already have enough processing power for that anyway...
I had an HP and Lexmark working with Ubuntu and didn't have any problems that I can remember. I still imagine the market demand is quite low, especially if there are some existing printers that already work.
I guess I could see it if it was DIY. But then the question would be why it hasn't been done already.
apparently commercial printers leave microdots on printed pages that can be used as fingerprints. Perhaps an open source one would not. just a guess though.
I think the microdots have become mandatory. Any commerical open source printer would likely be required to do this too. I guess I just don't see that as giving people a compelling reason to produce one (meaning I'm not surprised by a lack of people working on it).
Most printer companies make their money off of the ink/toner for consumer products. The printers themselves are usually close to break even prices. That doesn't leave much room for open source competitors.