My Dream Printer

I thought about printers a lot, because even now, I’m still not comfortable connecting a printer into a computer.

Maybe it got better with Windows 7 and Windows 10 and new Cups, but I don’t know…it used to be a big pain and lots of hours burned on finding out that a USB cable was too long or too shitty to work with the printer or when driver couldn’t find a printer and I really didn’t know why.

Also there were virtual ports and sometimes a really big magic to get it working.

Anyways, my dream printer should have an Ethernet port, use IPv4 and IPv6. There would be HTTP+REST+JSON interface. And also I could connect it via USB cable and then it would simulate Ethernet over USB or something like that. HTTP API would be fully documented and anybody could create user interfaces. It could handle PostScript, but also images, text and similar. But should also provide high fidelity and pixel/color interface.

I mean, technically printers are computers too. They used to have RISC or MIPS board with 16MB-1GB of RAM. From cheapest to quite expensive. Now I think Raspberry Pi 3 could do the job as it have four cores and 1GB of RAM.

Now I just need to make this dream reality…or persuade others to do that for them and me :D

EDIT: still valid, printers still suck in 2021, I tried to print 2600 and on some pages just silently fails.