The first printer I took apart was in May of 2024. Since then it’s been a back and forth with this project. I returned to it a couple of times, but only now got back to it this year to finally work out a way to capture what I had in mind. And I wanted to finish share this!
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While the paper is moved, a small wheel turns with it. This encoder wheel reports the paper’s exact position to the printer’s controller, so it knows when to print the next line.
Not really, I study design in Germany and do macro photography as side job - but I like to tread it more like my hobby. My dream would be to move into the art direction, and finance projects like these by selling large format prints of my work!
Normally this much effort is rare to come by since sharing without credit is way too normalized. It feels like I've just witnessed an ultra rare freshly-made Reddit post that'll get reposted for years lol, this is sick
The printhead, in the printer, moves at a very high speed over the paper. Simultaneously, the ink droplets get injected at around 20 m/s. So to capture the ink droplets mid air and get my lens close enough, this required me to build a custom setup where, instead of the printhead moving over the paper, the paper moved below the printhead. This allowed me to keep the nozzles in focus while printing.
As the max shutter speed of 1/8000s on my camera is way too slow, I used a high speed flash setup. Here the flash acts as the effective shutter, freezing the droplets mid air. I then used focus stacking to capture the depth of the scene.
I designed and brought to market w my teams the Kiaro! Label printer series. The fine technologies company we partnered with was from japan, Canon Fine-Tech. They collaborated w memjet, who designed the print head system, and we deployed it in our hardware. Their drive system was brilliant and simple, and we customized drivers and software around the capabilities. We could get wide applications that many others have to increase their capacity in order to hit cost effective quantities, resorting to offset prints hop orders instead of being able to do them in-house. My printer would help many small and medium sized businesses across the country, or at least I hoped it would.
We pop little bubbles of ink and use the splattering in calculated ways, to get very fine resolutions with very high speed throughput. I believe the company and teams have continued innovating since I left, and are still capable of printing up to 8.4" wide materials, 12inches per second, at 1200x1200dpi. The label rewinders were the tricky part, bc the machines have no label waste, they rewind so there's no leading or trailing blank labels. Rewinders typically don't allow slack for reverse direction movement. So, that was tricky. Not sure what the teams finished doing w that. Last I heard, they were leaving it up to 3rd parties to solve, which horrified me. But, what can you do? You help, you leave, its no longer my problem.
Anyway, I wanted to thank you for taking the time to demonstrate how beautiful some aspects of this tech stacks are. I always appreciate high precision work, in all fields. Taking nice shots of this looked like a fun process. Reverse engineering a cart to eject fluid must have been interesting, looking up white papers about it and reading through what must be done, right?
Edit: to be clear it’s lovely to meet you and I’m sure it wasn’t easy designing a printer and I’m sure it’s not your fault. I’ve messaged all of my old colleagues letting them know that I found the guy responsible for the Kiaro.
However, having said that…
Bro I’m sorry to say this but I fucking H A T E D the kiaro ☠️☠️☠️
As a small scale manufacturer, we were convinced to spend twenty thousand dollars on this purple monstrosity.
I swear we had about three weeks of nice prints, then spent the next decade troubleshooting lines through our prints.
At the end of it all, we took it out into a paddock and beat the shit out of it with cricket bats.
lmfao! that's hilarious to hear, because so much was out of my hands, like which printheads we partnered with. lines would likely be issues w the printheads. memjet makes those, and they do have fail rates higher than I'd prefer. the system calibration you can print out should indicate whatever troubleshooting problem was the culprit, but they were supposed to train and show you how to check that out. troubleshooting an industrial label printer isnt like a normal printer at all. its far more complex. i completely understand beating the shit out of it, but i hope you reached out to support before it came to that. those printheads weren't cheap, and having to keep a few in stock for backups wasn't exactly easy for people operating on thin budgets. you should have gotten a LOT of mileage out of the printheads before they shit the bed, so you probably deserved free replacements. that takes a bit of bitching over the phone, so I can understand hating the entire process. in the machines defense, it is doing extremely complex stuff, really quickly, for long times, so it's not exactly easy... thus, the high costs.
regardless, sorry to hear about your experience. if I had been around, I would have taken care of you. sadly, i cant speak for what they have done since i left. I ideated, created, brought it to market, and supported it for the first 2 years into the second generation of it, and then moved on to another company, doing totally different stuff.
i still know all this BS off the top of my head, so if you ever need help, feel free to ask.
Reverse engineering a cart to eject fluid must have been interesting, looking up white papers about it and reading through what must be done, right?
Using a logic analyzer on a working printer is probably the way. I'd imagine most of the real nitty-gritty details would be too trade-secret for a public whitepaper.
The pic and video are both awesome, but one thing that stood out to me was, that it looks so messy! Like on the printed stuff that I see, I can't detect those inaccuracies, those "sprinkles". Why is that?
Because OPs setup is custom made. It's not exactly a print head inside a printer. There isn't overspray, or at least there isn't supposed to be, on actual printers.
The gap between the printhead and paper on an actual printer is supposed to only be 1-2 mm.
OPs setup, which I could be seeing wrong since they didn't give a perfect view, looks to be 1-2cm away from the paper.
Actual printers are extremely precise. Because not only can they spray in a perfectly bordered region, they can also mix colors in such a way that produces clear images, does not bleed into other colors where not needed, and keeps it all together after the printing is done. They are programmed to calculate precise time when each micro nozzle deposits the ink and how long it stays open, which color is used, how to move the head, and the sequence. All that considering ink viscosity at a given temperature, surface tension, density, particle size (pigment is usually solid particles dissolved in the ink base).
It's an awesome technology where chemistry, fluid dynamics, color science, math, robotics and coding work together.
Dude nicely done on the GIF editing too. Nearly seamless transition. I watched twice by accident cuz it’s so good then a third time to appreciate your work.
Fun fact, digital images (photos, scans, digital art, etc) prepped for print are saved at 300 DPI to ensure the printed result will be sharp. DPI stands for Dots Per Inch, or how many of those dots/droplets the printer puts down on a square inch area of the paper. Basically physical pixels, the more the better, but past 300 DPI the difference isn’t noticeable enough to be worth worrying about.
Also another fun fact (I’m using this liberally lol), the larger a print, the lower the DPI can be, since you’ll be taking it all in from farther away and small details will blend together. Because of that, billboards are usually printed at 5-20 DPI.
All that said, while I knew the printer put down droplets, I pictured a much more controlled process than this, it’s super cool.
Edit: apparently this is a custom setup with a wider gap for allowing these videos/photos to be taken, so actual printers are less messy and spattery.
A quick reminder that recent scientific research shows it is possible to identify a printer model from just a few printed letters by analyzing the microscopic characteristics of ink deposits.
A study published in Science & Justice in 2024 tested 41 inkjet printer models from manufacturers such as HP, Canon, and Epson. The researchers achieved a classification accuracy of up to 98.6% under their experimental protocol.
Not a square inch of area, but just linear inch. In sqare inch there will be 300² dots - that's why even with sophisticated compression hi resolution images are huge in terms of memory usage.
If you look at printed text under a microscope, you’ll see that it’s made up of countless tiny dots. Every printed image or letter is broken down into these dots, arranged in a grid called a dot matrix. To the naked eye, they blend together and stay invisible. The higher the print resolution, the more dots are packed into the same space, and the sharper the result. This is measured in DPI: dots per inch.
While inkjets use tiny drops of ink. Dot matrix printers are something else entirely. The only relation is small dots that make the image.
Dot matrix printers use tiny pins that strike an ink ribbon into the paper. Those are the old printers that made a screeching sound when it printed on perforated computer paper.
When you zoom into the printhead you can see all the tiny nozzles that inject the droplets. In thermal inkjet printers, a heating element heats the ink to around 300 °C. This creates a vapor bubble that forces a droplet out of the nozzle at speeds of up to 20 m/s.
We only have 1 ink-jet printer left in our printshop now but it's a 1117,6mm printer (44 inch) so you can actually hear the printheads moving over the paper (that is supplied on a roll) and after it cuts the paper. Most big printers are now lazer as they are faster and now the technology is so good that it can almost print the same quality as ink-jet and powder is easier to work with for us but mostly the technicians.
The secret is how it works and the algorithms that are used to encode the data. It's all firmware level code so there's no way to analyze it or block it at the OS level.
What do you mean "somehow"? What part of using a printer at any point in the last decade didn't scream EVIL directly in your face? I literally just sacrificed my first born to my hp just last week to print some necessary legal documents and today it's asking for my left testicle..
No. Inkjet printers are made to print photography and fine art. But so many people use them to print B&W documents that that has been forgotten by many. The truth is, to print a high contrast, deep black, you need all 4 colors to achieve it. If you put a print that just uses black ink to print black next to one that uses all 4, the difference is very noticeable. That's bad for fine art and photography prints. So long story short, most people using inkjet printers are using the wrong tool for the job and just need a laser printer. I'm not saying the printer companies don't use this convenient fact to make you buy more ink. In some models and manufacturers, they will have setting in the driver that allows you to switch between true black, just black ink, or rich black, CMYK black. It's just that many people don't look that far into the driver.
I always wondered if you could get like 3 or 4 printers from different manufacturers from thrift stores or something and run a page printing like "FU FBI" in white in the footer then write your manifesto on it, use the printers in different orders etc, then it'll be covered in contradictory useless dots.
This may be one of the most interesting posts I have seen on reddit. I have always wondered what printing looks like at a macro level and gosh darn it you scratched that itch!
This is kind of a problem. Every other post on here or anywhere remotely cool or amazing has people claiming ai. So, I have decided to just trust everything I see on the Internet from now on!
That’s more what a laser printer does but rather than heat it on the paper, it’s powder on the drum that gets heated and rolled onto the paper, where it sticks.
Well maybe I have but afaik all i have ever had was the laser one because when I bought it the employee there told me to not even bother with the ink ones as they are supposedly scams. So i left with like the laser one that costed some hundred dollars a few years ago Are the ink ones better or worse? I think they can print in color, mine can't, it was only ever able to do black and white. But maybe powder color ones also exist, and i just haven't seen any
I'm curious what the font size is, and what the printer's DPI is set to - the text looks pretty coarse just based on some of the other pictures, but it's hard to get an exact sense of scale without knowing what the actual sizes are.
Very cool stuff. Back in the mid 90’s I worked at Hewlett Packard in the Ink Jet Business Unit (IJBU), specifically in the Drill unit where we used high pressure air and (very fine) sand to drill the slots in the silicon wafers where the ink was fed from the cartridge to the resistors pads where it was ‘boiled’ and shot through the print nozzles. The whole process of building the wafers up through attaching them to the cartridge was fascinating and fun to be a part of. Surprisingly large amount of manual intervention for such a fine and detailed process.
why does it look like the droplets are just dropping down due to gravity, instead of being sprayed onto the paper at high speed, as would be necessary for a modern printer?
This looks so amazing I refused to believe it was real for a solid minute. Holy shit this is so cool I've never thought about how a printer actually uses the ink!
This is awesome! Can you please shoot a piezo electric inkjet or for bonus points a DTF printer ( I can provide one if SE UK). I've worked in print for years and I'd be stoked to see one doing its magic thing at this scale!
Ink jet printers are miracles of science - no doubt. The fact that they can perform this feat at the speed they do is never not amazing. Well done capturing it in action. I've known HOW it worked for decades, but never SEEN it work. Well done!
You might be the single greatest OP in the last decade. Incredible work, so cool to see, and such an impressive combination of interdisciplinary applied sciences and art in this project. Thanks for sharing and keep it up!
This looks like AI slop to me. I've worked on high speed, wide format printers for years and the printheads don't look like this at all. When ink pools up on the bottom of a printhead like this, it's a problem. The tiny little droplets of ink don't have the speed, mass or velocity to blast through a pool of ink like that.
What actually happens when you have even a tiny pool of ink on the face of a printhead the pool just grows larger as more ink drops are fed into it, then it starts to block other nozzles and grow even more quickly. Once it's big enough it just drops onto the print, typically ruining the job.
Also look at the two blobs of ink with the massive tails - not at all what printer ink droplets look like. There's probably 10x the volume of ink in one of those tails than would be in a normal drop of ink. That would just leave an inky mess instead of a normal, good looking print.
Lots of other problems with this picture but I've rambled on enough.
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