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Ask HN: When did you stop using a printer and why?
Did you stop after a specific event? If so, which one?
- simonblack 4y agoI haven't. In fact, I just bought a new toner cartridge for my black-and-white HP 426 MFP. What I have stopped doing is using the fax section of that MFP. The last fax I sent was about 6 months ago. Note: I probably do as much scanning as printing.
- hirundo 4y agoCount 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.
- frompdx 4y agoPersonally, 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.
- killjoywashere 4y agoUh, which Brother printer is this? We probably go through a cartridge every several months.
- thayne 4y agoI 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tony-allan 4y agoAfter I brought my first iPad I realised that I was reviewing documents using the iPad rather than paper. I just stopped printing after that.
- daggersandscars 4y agoI 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.
- omnicognate 4y agoI just woke up one morning and realised the printers had been using me all along.
- vuln 4y agoI thought it was just me that had the realization one morning. Glad to know I have company.
- arthurcolle 4y agoI 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
- chomp 4y agoNever. My kids enjoy coloring pages, I have legal docs that need signing and scanning, and my wife teaches at a local college. Printer is pretty busy.
- h4waii 4y agoI 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.
- TMWNN 4y ago>I use a Dymo label printer for shipping labels, and a Brother laser printer for packing slips almost every day for my small business. I print the packing slips with the shipping labels on the label printer.
- h4waii 4y agoHonestly, I had never even considered that and now I feel silly! 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.
- TMWNN 4y ago>Honestly, I had never even considered that and now I feel silly! You may find this interesting. <https://np.reddit.com/r/Flipping/comments/wtxtv7/print_shipping_labels_get_a_label_printer/ 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.
- gardenhedge 4y agoAbout 10 years ago. If I need to print, and I rarely do, I will go to a local printing place. At least their printers will work
- don-code 4y agoI 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.
- alpaca128 4y agoWhen I started signing PDF documents with a graphic tablet instead of printing, signing and scanning them each time.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoThat was always silly wasn't it? A few decades ago I scanned my signature. I place it on a pdf with gimp and output as jpg or png then return.
- the_third_wave 4y agoI 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. [1] https://xournal.sourceforge.net/ https://xournal.sourceforge.net/ (packaged by most distributions)
- mixmastamyk 4y agoNeat, will remember if I really need a pdf.
- alpaca128 4y agoXournalpp 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.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoA 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.
- rootw0rm 4y agoJust hook it up via USB?
- mixmastamyk 4y agoThere's one in the house, centrally located. Could be done, but would make it dependent on one computer. Our desks are small as well. :-(
- Nextgrid 4y agoUse a small computer (Raspberry Pi? OpenWrt router? etc) as a proxy to network the printer in a safe way.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoGreat idea!
- walterbell 4y ago> I have no way of knowing 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.
- rossdavidh 4y agoI never stopped. I would like to say, though, that Molly Wood's printer rant is still one of the best things on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj_4KkTWW2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj_4KkTWW2o My daughter, who is 17, also needs to use the printer occasionally for school.
- monk_e_boy 4y agoI 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.
- marcofatica 4y agoYou can, see https://superuser.com/questions/1080059/word-displays-a-line-separator-between-pages-instead-of-page-breaks https://superuser.com/questions/1080059/word-displays-a-line...
- c0balt 4y agoSomwthing 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.
- slowmovintarget 4y agoI have not. Working from home meant I needed a printer at home. Especially for official documents needed for travel.
- stuartcw 4y ago10 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. Why? Because dried up ink was a rip off.
- LadyCailin 4y agoToner 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.
- cassianoleal 4y agoI 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. Costs £102 directly from HP in the UK. https://www.hp.com/gb-en/shop/product.aspx?id=W2G51A&opt=B19&sel=DEF https://www.hp.com/gb-en/shop/product.aspx?id=W2G51A&opt=B19...
- cercatrova 4y agoSeveral years ago, I can't remember exactly when. I simply don't have things I need to print anymore.
- rootw0rm 4y agoI 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.
- arcticbull 4y agoWhen 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.
- dicriseg 4y agoI 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.
- 300bps 4y agoAgreed 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.
- Aeolun 4y agoEven 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).
- robbintt 4y agoI also have a brother laser printer. I bought it used in 2011. Brother laser printers from that era are alright. It got used this morning.
- Daub 4y agoFor 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.
- orev 4y agoThe 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.
- Daub 4y agoI use those methods as well, but nothing seems to beat printing. One thing I like is the ability to write notes directly on the paper using a pen. 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?
- jimmux 4y agoWhen 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.
- thrill 4y agoWhen 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.
- vincent-manis 4y agoI have vastly reduced the amount of printing I do. I do almost all of my reading on a tablet, for example. However, I do find that I'm more efficient at proofreading when I print out a draft, because I can write directly on it (and yes, I have an iPad Pro and a Thinkpad X1 Yoga, both with styli), attach PostIts, and the like. I recently bought a high-yield toner cartridge for my laser printer, and hope to live long enough to need another.
- porcoda 4y agoI never stopped. Tried iPads and a remarkable2 but never was able to beat how I read technical papers printed out and marked with pen/pencil.
- beej71 4y agoI need my printer at least once a year to print my state taxes (which don't have free e-file and I'm not paying Intuit a dime of I can help it). When it dies, I'll probably just start using the print shop. I simply don't have much to print.
- mod 4y agoI've not had one for a long time. My business has one, that's usually enough for me. But I've recently been thinking about getting one. I want to print templates for doing woodworking & similar in the shop.
- imroot 4y agoI moved to Miami, and just didn't buy one when I moved down here. In the rare occasion that I need to print, I'll swing by the business center in my condo building and print it out.
- tibbon 4y agoI still use one. It took me getting a HP color laser that did double-sided printing, with good network support - to enjoy printing. No "your yellow has run out, you can't print black" bullshit. I actually get a large number of pages per toner. The toners aren't joined. It just works, and is reasonably fast enough for home use. I find its really useful for organizing home things, printing off the odd invoice to mail a check in, role playing games, printing off sheet music, etc. I don't use it daily or weekly, but when I use it I'm glad I have it. I like that my friends can connect easily on the network now without too much weird driver stuff. If they are on my wifi they can even print from their phone in general easily.
- RhysU 4y agoSeconded on a duplexing laser with network support. Makes all the difference in the world to be able to print nothing for 90 days then to casually drop 100+ flawless pages. Biggest trick is finding replacement toner once every couple of years.
- walterbell 4y agoPrinters (3-D teleportation! reanimation! duplication!) are sci-fi magic. Thanks to smartphone cameras, scanning and OCR are now free. Using DRM-free ethernet-without-wifi Brother laser and Dymo label printers. Looking into combo 3D printer / laser engraver / CNC cutter, to join the revolution in photogrammetry and Lidar cameras.
- StewardMcOy 4y agoI believe the last time I printed something out was in 2011. I had been keeping a printer for years just to file my state taxes. In 2011, Intuit's Free File Fillable Forms became available not just for federal taxes, but for state taxes as well. It never sat right with me that I should have to pay a private corporation to eFile my taxes, and they've always been simple enough that I didn't need a professional to prepare them, so I stubbornly printed them out and mailed them in every year. I didn't like that FFFF was provided by Intuit, but at least I wasn't giving them money directly. Then, for the 2020 tax year, they stopped providing the service for state taxes, but I no longer have a working printer. I had to go to a local print shop to get everything printed out. It was still cheaper than eFile software, but it was a drag.
- blakesterz 4y ago100% of the things I need to print at home are things for the kids. I imagine once they are grown, I will never need to print anything again.
- sh4un 4y ago
- kcplate 4y agoIt’s been at least 13 years. Weekly airline commuting forced me to eliminate paper to avoid hauling it with me.
- ioseph 4y agoI've actually never owned my own printer until recently purchasing a B&W laser, it's used exclusively for sheet music.
- retrocryptid 4y agoTen years ago, maybe. Partially because they were impossible to configure. I have a Leenucks desktop and getting a HP or Brother laser printer to remember how to talk to it is like teaching pakleds warp field theory. But mostly I stopped because there was a critical mass of people who seemed to be okay with me emailing PDFs. If I need to print something, I email it to kinkos. I've probably spent $20 on printing there in the last 3 years so it probably saves money as well.
- JohnFen 4y agoI still use a printer regularly.
- LinuxBender 4y agoI still print regularly. Most government offices are not entirely online yet and even those that are still have processes that require sending in signed papers. I also make use of the scanner on the printer to scan forms and archive them. I print legal documents all the time. I also print labels for shipping as my handwriting has become atrocious over time. Printing labels reduces risk of shipping errors and there is no harm in making a shippers life slightly easier. I also print labels when returning defective things purchased online. As a side note my Brother Laserjet has been rock solid. knocks on wood It's the only printer that has stood the tests of time and usage thus far. There is a company down the highway from me that can print things but then I have to email my documents to them. That is one more copy of the documents laying around on someones mail server and on their PC of unknown patched/security status.
- avean 4y agoI didn't use my printer really often and inks were drying. I find it cheaper to go to a printing service near me. I now don't have to manage technical problems. It's sometimes complicated when I need urgently to print a document but I found solutions. You can for example add your sign on PDFs by modifying them. My printer is now useful only as a scanner.
- the_third_wave 4y agoThe real question is "when did you stop using inkjet printers", the answer to which is "a long time ago". I got a Deskjet 500 when those were fresh and managed to never buy an "official" (i.e. expensive) cartridge for the thing, instead using a syringe+needle and a jar of fountain pen ink to refill the thing. When the local Aldi supermarket dumped some HP colour inkjets I got one and used it for a few weeks until the ink ran out. For that printer HP had learned their lesson and made it nigh impossible to refill the cartridge so back into the carton the printer went never to be used again. I reverted to the Deskjet 500 and fountain pen ink until I got a Laserjet 2200 DTN from some job which was about to throw it out because of a broken fuser sleeve. One new fuser sleeve later I entered the wondrous world of toner-based printers and never looked back. This is some 20 years ago now, the Laserjet still works but it recently got relegated to emergency duty when I got a Canon MF9220CDN for free due to similar reasons. One new black toner cartridge later we entered the wondrous world of toner-based colour copy-printers, we will see if we end up looking back. The thing is ridiculously over-specified for our use but since it only uses 1W in standby - less than the Laserjet - that does not really matter. It takes up space but makes good for that by including a scanner. A toner cartridge which is supposed to last for ~6000 pages (i.e. years worth of printing for us) costs around €20-€30, a full set of 4 around €80-90. I have 2 black cartridges so I'm set for a number of years...
- nateb2022 4y agoAs a student I don't expect to be mostly done with one for the next couple years. Even once I'm done, I will still probably have an all-in-one copy/printer since I do occasionally require one for various things, such as making a copy of an important document, or whatnot.