r/BeAmazed • u/bymingo100 • 9h ago
Miscellaneous / Others A printer printing onto paper.
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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u/bymingo100 9h ago
https://reddit.com/link/19rfwxggsbq79/video/y1jtcqrqhuwh1/player
Building the rig.
The biggest challenge was speed and lighting.
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.
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u/Emgimeer 9h ago
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?
Wish you all the best!
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u/axonxorz 6h ago
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.
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u/InertiaCreeping 4h ago edited 3h ago
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.
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u/GregTheMad 4h ago
Wait! Where is the Cyan? How could you print black text without cyan ink being full and present for moral support?! /s
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u/ShakethatYam 6h ago
Wonder if you could have used one the older inkjets from the 2000s that printed like 2 pages a minute 😂
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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n 11m ago
This is the coolest shit i've seen in a long time on reddit. Very cool. Could do this with different kinds of printers btw . . .
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u/Nerd4funNprofit 5h ago
Can you tell us a bit about the lens and camera if you have time? I'm interested in doing failure mode analysis during a tensile test on some very small gauge wire, and your setup may port over well to my application.
In any case, great work, and good on you for sharing all this additional detail, it's really fascinating. Cheers!
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u/GrimResistance 17m ago
That's insane. Did you ever wonder if the resulting image was just going to end up being uninteresting after doing all that work?
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u/bymingo100 9h ago
https://reddit.com/link/19rfwvfmyegkj/video/m280zockhuwh1/player
The setup.
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.
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u/SanchoPandas 9h ago
Okay, OP, I'm thoroughly impressed. Not only by the initial photo but all the additional content and context you've added to this thread. Well done!!
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u/Potato_the_second_ 8h ago edited 8h ago
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
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u/Doidleman53 8h ago
Unfortunately the reality we are in now is if OP didn't provide these additional pictures, many people would be calling this AI.
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u/JerryfromCan 6h ago
It’s ok. AI will train on this and make it look more dramatic so in 8 months someone will say they saw a better video of this process.
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u/SabreSeb 4h ago
I'll be honest that was my first thought when I clicked on the original photo, glad I was wrong
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u/CheeseDonutCat 5h ago
This whole post would be filled with AI claims if OP didn't do this.
I hate that people have to do this now, but the extra info OP gave us is really cool.
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u/KingOfWhateverr 9h ago
I keep seeing your posts+explanations. Keep up the cool work! One of the very few amazing things left on the sub lol
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u/sorbetluver 5h ago
Hey OP, what’s your academic and career background? I’m super curious.
Or do you just enjoy tinkering as a hobby?
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u/bymingo100 4h ago
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!
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u/Crazy__Donkey 8h ago
So the space between the droplets is becaus the cartridge is not flat of the page?
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u/bymingo100 9h ago
https://reddit.com/link/19rfwf63gir1g/video/yyvcx4vqfuwh1/player
Ink droplets landing on paper, writing “macro”
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u/hnglmkrnglbrry 9h ago
Looks like the title sequence of a Netflix show about corporate attorneys.
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u/A-Good-Weather-Man 8h ago
Coming this spring, John Johnson and Bob Roberts take on case after case in,
Fine Print.
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u/llOlOOlOO 8h ago
I love it, but if I know anything about tv, it should be Michael Fine and Robert Print (or something)
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u/spad3x 8h ago
Cancelled after 2 seasons, leaving off after a wild cliffhanger that never gets answered
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u/lessfrictionless 4h ago
Careful AI might seize it as an asset and that'll be precisely what it's used for.
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u/_Screw_The_Rules_ 9h ago
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?
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u/thisdesignup 8h ago
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.
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u/dementorpoop 9h ago
Overspray. Probably too small to detect with the naked eye but perhaps try under a magnifying glass
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u/maior_novoreg 2h ago
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.
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u/ValyrianSteelYoGirl 9h ago
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.
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u/Grouchy_Big3195 8h ago
That's insane, I always imagine it like a tattoo but on paper. Never in 40 years of my life would I have thought it would drop ink.
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u/aguywithbrushes 7h ago
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.
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u/fabulot 6h ago
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.
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u/industrialHVACR 6h ago
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.
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u/Sherwood6 6h ago
Waveform could use some optimisation to reduce satellites, assuming it's a piezoelectric printhead. Getting PTSD flashbacks to my time working on them.
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u/bymingo100 9h ago
https://reddit.com/link/19rfwmt3ubqlc/video/ltmiuzglguwh1/player
Zooming into the printhead.
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.
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u/bymingo100 9h ago
https://reddit.com/link/19rfwkxskkwgz/video/hoy23ixdguwh1/player
A dotmatrix being created.
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.
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u/spekt50 2h ago
While injets 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.
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u/bymingo100 9h ago
https://reddit.com/link/19rfwi1abrhph/video/rwrtc2i2guwh1/player
Printhead injecting ink droplets.
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u/Motorcyclegrrl 9h ago
Is that a spider? Did the ink shoot it?
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u/hayashikin 9h ago
I think that's a drop of ink with enough surface tension to hold its shape for a while on the glass
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u/bymingo100 9h ago
The print size in comparison to my finger.
(Yes, I edited my fingerprint just to be sure.)
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u/aguywithbrushes 7h ago
Lmao can never be too safe! This is so cool, the whole thing, thanks for sharing!
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u/bymingo100 9h ago
https://reddit.com/link/19rfwzd3pmtt0/video/gim171zzhuwh1/player
The printer printing a picture of itself.
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u/Character_Past5515 4h ago
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.
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u/2squishmaster 9h ago
My brain is struggling to accept this. In the video the speed makes it look like gravity is at play here which throws me off even more
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u/EthicalHypotheticals 9h ago
Now add the FBI tracking dots!!!
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u/Cold_Blusted 8h ago edited 7h ago
This is wild.... "printer manufacturers made a secret agreement with governments"
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u/SuperCruisePanther 7h ago
It wasn't secret, people just don't care about printer news.
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u/Bulky-Employer-1191 5h ago
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.
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u/cubano_exhilo 8h ago
Is this why it refuses to print black and white without magenta? Bc they use colored ink for these snitch dots
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u/cam52391 8h ago
Yup! That's why you need the colors even to print B&W so your printer can snitch on you
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u/cubano_exhilo 8h ago
Somehow I always knew the printer was evil
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u/AcerbicCapsule 7h ago
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..
/s
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u/Several-Action-4043 3h ago
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.
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u/batdrumman 8h ago
Every printer nowadays has those snitch dots AFAIK
Fuck printer companies
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u/Einar_47 8h ago
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.
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u/Weary-Camel6762 9h ago
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!
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u/linecraftman 9h ago
Insane detail, whats the scale of the image?
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u/aguywithbrushes 7h ago
Very tiny, OP shared the finished product here https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/s/7rqHEFM0N8
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u/WasZurHecke 8h ago edited 8h ago
I first thought "meh AI" when i saw this, but the additional content you provided really made this outstanding.
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u/70parwater 8h ago
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!
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u/c0gster 6h ago
But I thought printers lay down a super thin powder in the shape of the text and then heat it up to like 500 degrees to fuse it to the paper?
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u/Character_Past5515 4h ago
You are talking about a lazer printer (that we in our printshop mostly use), this video demonstrates an ink-jet printer.
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u/Several-Action-4043 3h ago
And the printer in this post is a bubblejet style inkjet. There are also piezo crystal based printheads that are far more reliable and last longer.
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u/stuff-printer 5h ago
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.
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u/cinnasota 4h ago
There are different types of printers.
Never heard of ink-jet?
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u/c0gster 3h ago
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
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u/wildcardbets 9h ago
What’s really amazing about this post are all the videos OP has posted, really interesting to see! Thanks for sharing!
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u/eduardopy 9h ago
Really cool shots and videos you shared, thanks. What camera do you use btw, what lens
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u/SummaryEye80019 4h ago
It's really annoying how OP sprinkled everything in the comments instead of not doing that.
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u/HWDESIGNCO 4h ago
Absolute insanity. As a designer I work with print every day, I dont even think about it. This is fascinating and mind blowing. Thank you for this.
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u/Popka_Akoola 9h ago
Dude thank you so much for taking on this project. What an absolutely amazing result(s) that you’ve shared with us
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u/BladeOfKrota 9h ago
Absolutely amazing I saw all the extra comments you made too thank you so much! I’ve always wanted to see this!
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u/DarkModeOnly 8h ago
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.
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u/aguywithbrushes 6h ago
They shared a photo of the printed text here, no mention of DPI though. Maybe the people at r/theydidthemath can take care of it lol https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/s/7rqHEFM0N8
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u/Character_Past5515 4h ago
very low if I compare it with text we print at 400dpi, this looks less than 100. If this would come out of our printers we would call a technician xD.
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u/Consistent-Bowler95 8h ago
Interesting it can be so accurate with such buildup around the individual nozzles.
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u/TrayLaTrash 8h ago
Why is macro photography all over the place now? On my youtube, reddit, wife's facebook. just started aeeing it everywhere these past few days.
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u/redditrice 8h ago
u/bymingo100, are you the one who recently posted that scissor macro? I’ve never seen anything quite like your recent work. Keep it up!
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u/Dbuggybugster94 6h ago
Saying this as a print engineer myself - I’ve never seen so many people interested in printing. Good job OP 😂
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u/BronzePeregrine 6h ago
A printer printing printouts by printing printed print patterns onto printable paper, printing and reprinting print after print until the printer has printed its printing prints, producing printed printings of print-printed print material through continuous printing, reprinting, and overprinting onto paper for printing.
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u/vespilio 6h ago
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.
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u/Mandelvolt 5h ago
Amazing! I honestly immediately disregarded this as AI, but I am glad I was proven wrong.
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u/VonSkullenheim 5h ago
This is one of the most impressive macro shots I've ever seen. Truly incredible work. I'd kill to see a somewhat-comparable in-motion shot.
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u/Bah_weep_grana 5h ago
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?
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u/Ill-Training7282 5h ago
Moving the paper under a fixed printhead makes a lot of sense for keeping focus at that scale.
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u/Loop0666 5h ago
Tutte le cose che hai mostrato con cura maniacale! Sembra ottimo materiale per un esposizione artistica o scientifica.
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u/frankFerg1616 4h ago
I'm dumb, can anyone explain what I am looking at and why this is so interesting to everybody?
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4h ago
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u/sdrawkcabineter 4h ago
Ooh, do a color plotter and a color laser printer next, plz OP.
You're our only hope!
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u/Charge_parity 3h ago
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!
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u/m8_is_me 3h ago
Any way to download the original quality? (or anything other than reddit's compressed hell)
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u/EmicationLikely 2h ago
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!
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