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Years after it was revealed that HP’s printer ink was more expensive than actual human blood, printing photos at home on an inkjet is still a ripoff. You’re better off having them printed professionally at a photo center, or, by recycling a bunch of old electronics into a home-made printer that uses a tapping pencil in lieu of ink carts.

YouTuber Terrormink upcycled an old scanner, hard drive, and CD-ROM drive with some Meccano parts and an Arduino to run the whole thing. The printer itself isn’t easy on the eyes, but there’s a lovely aesthetic to the pointillist images it creates. What isn’t quite as lovely is the incessant tapping sound that’s more grating than even the loudest of dot-matrix-printers of the ‘80s.

[YouTube via Hackaday]