Count me out. I still use a monochrome laser printer occasionally for personal business, and have fun covering the walls with prints from a big photo printer. James Webb's Neptune is the latest.
Personally, I never stopped because there are still occasions where the best way to view something is in printed form. Those occasions get fewer by the year of course. For example, in the past I would print directions from MapQuest, and later Google Maps. Phone apps have eliminated the need and made getting directions somewhere much better. On the other hand, I do a lot of interviews and read a lot of résumés. Those are generally intended for print form, and I prefer to print them out.
Also, with a good laser printer there is no need to stop printing. It took 10 years to use the toner cartridge in by Brother printer. I'm hoping for 10 more out of the new cartridge I just bought.
5370DW with the standard TN-620 toner cartridge. 3000 page yield. Average of 300 pages printed per year based on the expected yield and how long it took to use up.
I stopped owning a printer when the one I had in college stopped working, and I realized it was cheaper to pay 10-20 cents per page to print at the library on the rare occasion I needed to print something, than to buy a new printer and ink. And honestly, it was less of a hastle than printing with a cheap home printer too (at least since I go to the library fairly often anyways).
Oh and now I don't need space for a printer either.
I stopped using photo printers after realizing I could not use them frequently enough to keep the inks from drying out. It was cheaper to pay a professional print place for the few times I needed a print.
I stopped using b&w printers for personal use when I got multiple monitors / a monitor big enough to show reference material + workspace. I still have a b&w laser for when hard copies are required by 3rd parties.
I use printers for reading technical papers and sometimes code documentation. I use a brother laserjet, I hate it because I have to use a USB because the wifi connection never seems to work properly
I use a Dymo label printer for shipping labels, and a Brother laser printer for packing slips almost every day for my small business.
Both connected to my Proxmox machine running cupsd, printing from all platforms in my household; Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, all work fine, I print remotely though a WireGuard tunnel when not at home.
I still have a 90s LaserJet printer, back from when they were made like tanks. The college I went to got rid of a bunch of them in the late 2000s, so I ended up pulling the toner cartridges out of the discard pile. I haven't bought toner since 2005 (?), and I have three more cartridges to go. The cartridges also include the drum, so there's no separate drum to fail / replace.
It's a parallel printer, so it's connected over the network with a JetDirect. Not sure what the story for using it on Windows / Mac would be, but cups and sane support it like a charm.
It's also been upgraded to a whopping 10MB of memory, and has a built-in scanner that sees relatively much more frequent use (weekly scanning - I print a few times a year).
Unless the printer mechanically fails, I'm set for awhile.
I do the using Xournal [1] which is tailor-made for creating annotations. It leaves the PDF as is, saving your edits to a sidecar file (*.xoj) which when loaded pulls in the original PDF. It exports edited documents to 'real' PDFs with selectable text etc.
Xournalpp is also worth a look. It's almost identical but with a few additional little features. Either way I can recommend both, not just for PDF annotation but also taking notes with a pen.
A few decades ago when multiple high-res monitors became affordable. (However, partner is addicted to printing important documents, so we have one.)
Before that was fine to print at the print shop for a while until I learned copiers and printers are keeping internal copies of files and scans that are not deleted. Very few folks are aware of this, but the world keeps on spinning somehow.
So I've been using our home printer here and there. But it is hooked up to wifi, and who knows what it is doing on the internet besides checking for new firmware. I have no way of knowing. You can't trust any electronics and companies any longer to respect privacy. So I'd like to get rid of it in the long run.
Wonder if the wifi router supports disabling wan access for certain devices? I'll have to look.
tcpdump (or maybe a web search) can show which domain/IP is being used for printer firmware checks, then you can whitelist that target+DNS and block other traffic.
Wi-Fi, however, is a dumpster fire. There are printers with USB, ethernet and zero wireless radios.
I print all the time. For students, a print out has a different flavour, texture, um ... feel to it.
For personal use - I tend to print out then cut the margins off and stick the pages together to get a better feel for the document.
Side note: why can't I get rid of the idea of pages in Word? Just let me type on an infinite white space. When things (tables, images, diagrams, paragraphs) get split over two "pages" it makes no sense. 99.9% of documents don't get printed.
Somwthing like a mix between word (layout/ ui) and jupyter notebook (for the infinite single page design with cells) might be an interesting project. Maybe as a libre- or openoffice fork.
10 years ago. I’m in Japan and I go to the nearest convenience store, transfer the pdf document to the printer and get a clean print. I only use the printer for two pages a month to post the document, stamped with my company hanko, to a traditional Japanese big company.
The only time that I regret not having a printer is when it is pouring with rain on print day.
Toner printers work really well, and don’t “dry up”. If you’re printing on a regular basis, I cannot see why you wouldn’t get a good quality laser printer. If you don’t have room in your desk or something, that makes sense, but if that’s the only reason, I recommend looking further into it.
I have an HP M15w laser printer. It's black only but that's enough for my purposes. It's so small I don't know how someone could use lack of space as a justification for not having one.
I have a Xerox color laser I got for cheap. It sucks, and I found out after purchase that Xerox had sold me a broken refurbished machine, but the replacement mostly works. Print quality is pretty decent.
When I moved out of my parents place years ago, I never bought a printer. I printed stuff at work from time to time as needed, and over time, the need for printed paperwork diminished. The last major thing I use printers for is immigration paperwork.
I haven’t. I have a Brother laser printer that’s probably 10 years old now, if not closer to 15. I don’t use it frequently, but it comes in handy occasionally. My wife prints a little more than I do. Toner is cheap and lasts forever. I think I’ve been through 4-5 toner carts and 1 drum replacement.
If it died, I’d get another. As infrequently as I use one, when you need it it’s nice to have.
Agreed on all points and to add for people who use inkjet style printers: stop. Switch to a low cost black and white laser printer. Unbelievably fast printing, toner never dries out like ink does, printer doesn’t have to dance for 30 seconds before it can print, toner last forever compared to ink.
Even going for a color laser printer isn’t really cost prohibitive any more for anyone with an average income. The Brother entry model is $300 or so and you can use it basically forever.
I say this because I had only b/w for years before finally getting annoyed enough that I upgraded to the color variant.
The only negative is that the thing is so ridiculously big (compared to inkjet or b/w laser).
Ditto. Our Brother laser printer gets used primarily to print package labels for e-commerce returns. Secondarily, for forms required to interact with certain bureaucratic entities (paper is either required or easier than dealing with a crap website; also sometimes it's useful to print blank forms for drafts).
Almost all of what we print is either outbound or transient (and shredded once its immediate purpose is fulfilled). 99% of what needs to be preserved long-term gets scanned (and shredded).
The above has been our operating mode for at least 10 years.
Same here, we bought a Brother color laser printer around when my partner started grad school. Since then it's been through a few of the high yield toner cartridges without a problem.
For me, a printer is vital when proofing checking important documents. Documents may read fine on the screen, but the moment you print them out all those nastily little errors become more apparent.
The same effect can be seen by doing other things, like printing to PDF, or just changing the font to something you don’t normally use. For some reason the change of context itself makes the difference.
When I realised the same office supply place I bought print supplies from could simply do the prints. Or I could use the library, university, or work printers. It ended up being quicker and cheaper to outsource, plus I don't have another machine taking up valuable desk space.
When my wife started working at a library 10 years ago. Now on the rare occasion I need one, I can just send the documents to their system for remote print, which gets billed to my library account, and she brings it home. I suspect many libraries have similar setups, except for the convenient door-to-door service part.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadAlso, with a good laser printer there is no need to stop printing. It took 10 years to use the toner cartridge in by Brother printer. I'm hoping for 10 more out of the new cartridge I just bought.
Oh and now I don't need space for a printer either.
I stopped using b&w printers for personal use when I got multiple monitors / a monitor big enough to show reference material + workspace. I still have a b&w laser for when hard copies are required by 3rd parties.
Both connected to my Proxmox machine running cupsd, printing from all platforms in my household; Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, all work fine, I print remotely though a WireGuard tunnel when not at home.
I print the packing slips with the shipping labels on the label printer.
We already had the scanner+printer cause my partner works remotely, and I just assumed the cost for toner and A4 was cheaper than thermal label.
You may find this interesting. <https://np.reddit.com/r/Flipping/comments/wtxtv7/print_shipp...>
>I just assumed the cost for toner and A4 was cheaper than thermal label.
I can't speak for elsewhere, but in the US, both FedEx and UPS provide thermal label rolls for free to those with accounts.
It's a parallel printer, so it's connected over the network with a JetDirect. Not sure what the story for using it on Windows / Mac would be, but cups and sane support it like a charm.
It's also been upgraded to a whopping 10MB of memory, and has a built-in scanner that sees relatively much more frequent use (weekly scanning - I print a few times a year).
Unless the printer mechanically fails, I'm set for awhile.
[1] https://xournal.sourceforge.net/ (packaged by most distributions)
Before that was fine to print at the print shop for a while until I learned copiers and printers are keeping internal copies of files and scans that are not deleted. Very few folks are aware of this, but the world keeps on spinning somehow.
So I've been using our home printer here and there. But it is hooked up to wifi, and who knows what it is doing on the internet besides checking for new firmware. I have no way of knowing. You can't trust any electronics and companies any longer to respect privacy. So I'd like to get rid of it in the long run.
Wonder if the wifi router supports disabling wan access for certain devices? I'll have to look.
tcpdump (or maybe a web search) can show which domain/IP is being used for printer firmware checks, then you can whitelist that target+DNS and block other traffic.
Wi-Fi, however, is a dumpster fire. There are printers with USB, ethernet and zero wireless radios.
My daughter, who is 17, also needs to use the printer occasionally for school.
For personal use - I tend to print out then cut the margins off and stick the pages together to get a better feel for the document.
Side note: why can't I get rid of the idea of pages in Word? Just let me type on an infinite white space. When things (tables, images, diagrams, paragraphs) get split over two "pages" it makes no sense. 99.9% of documents don't get printed.
The only time that I regret not having a printer is when it is pouring with rain on print day.
Why? Because dried up ink was a rip off.
Costs £102 directly from HP in the UK.
https://www.hp.com/gb-en/shop/product.aspx?id=W2G51A&opt=B19...
If it died, I’d get another. As infrequently as I use one, when you need it it’s nice to have.
I say this because I had only b/w for years before finally getting annoyed enough that I upgraded to the color variant.
The only negative is that the thing is so ridiculously big (compared to inkjet or b/w laser).
Almost all of what we print is either outbound or transient (and shredded once its immediate purpose is fulfilled). 99% of what needs to be preserved long-term gets scanned (and shredded).
The above has been our operating mode for at least 10 years.
I have a Wacom Cintiq, so I could conceivably do the same tHing digitaly, but it isn’t the same. Something about the materiality of paper?