6 ms·
The printer industry needs a revolution.
by eis3nheim 4y ago
The printer industry needs a revolution.
- rohan_ 4y agoDoes it? It’s a dying industry. When was the last time you printed anything?
- hu3 4y agoYesterday, unfortunately. Had to print some contracts.
- maerF0x0 4y agoa few days ago?
- Arrath 4y agoHaven't done much government contracting where documents are required to be submitted on paper in triplicate, eh? Sometimes I think I've singlehandedly kept one paper mill open with my current project. E: With the submittals I'm preparing this morning, I expect to print just north of a thousand pages of documentation by the end of the day.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoI know a guy who does printer support for biiiig (1 ton, length of the room, $100k+ easily) printers. He takes stacks of paper. Running a 500 page ream through is a test. If it is something like streaking, which requires hunting down and cleaning up toner leaks and accumulations, he can run many many tests... Feel not guilt for actual valid use.
- squarefoot 4y ago3 hours ago, and yesterday, and the other day, etc. etc. Some activities still need documents to be presented and signed in dead tree form.
- trynewideas 4y agonervously looks at the tabletop RPG and CCG shelves next to my printer
- yamtaddle 4y agoGot kids? All the damn time. Have craft-related hobbies? All the damn time. Patterns, instructions, et c. Despite having a shitload of iPads and extra laptops and such around. Paper's far nicer in many cases, and sometimes cannot be replaced by a screen of any kind.
- mirekrusin 4y ago"Daddy, can you print me something" daily here as well, most time wasted on finding the bloody print-and-cut cartoon best in the world character of the week.
- aequitas 4y agoA while back I taught my oldest how to turn the printer on (and get the paper coming out, so I don't have to walk and get it myself) and she also wanted to "learn" how to print, so I explained the 2 mouse clicks needed for that. There is just something special about a kid that has unlocked a new magic ability and excitingly walking out of the room to return gleefully with a piece of paper in their hands. So far she printed recipes for cookies (which she somehow learned how to search for), drawings for her little sister and pictures of cats.
- magicalhippo 4y ago> Despite having a shitload of iPads and extra laptops and such around. My SO likes to bake decorated cakes. When decorating she prints out the design, so she can put the cut-out paper pieces on the cake to finalize sizing and composition of the decoration. Be it text, a symbol or something more elaborate. Just so much easier than trying to imagine what that thing on the tablet would look like draped over the side of the cake.
- yamtaddle 4y agoRight, there are tons of cases in various crafts, including things like cake decorating, where you need to destroy or deform a template or guide or placeholder, or at least for which it'd be very convenient, if not strictly necessary, to do so. You obviously can't and/or don't want to do that with a screen.
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoGee, we’re talking about printers not fax machines :)
- vorpalhex 4y agoManuscripts. My spouse runs multi-hundred page manuscripts off anywhere from once to a few times a year. Sheet music. Patterns. Legal documents. There are still places that won't do esign.
- salawat 4y agoI print standard library docs all the time to read. That includes building Table of contents/indexes. I print out pages of source code to do physical cross ref of when I get in some really gnarly code to help me physically reckon through the abstraction spaghetti. I print invoices, letters, diagrams, books, pamphlets. I mean, just because you don't do documents or have anything you want on paper, doesn't mean everyone else doesn't.
- jemmyw 4y agoThat's crazy. You know the text is just as real if you read it from the screen? I've never owned a printer, they're Satan's own gift to the consumer electronics market. Paper is also annoying to deal with. I've had an e-reader for 10 years but the odd older book isn't available. You'd think based on comments online that a real book is some magical wonderful thing, but they're an ass to use, heavy, large to store. Their only virtue is that they look nice on a shelf. But the other thing that looks nice is something other than a shelf.
- yamtaddle 4y ago> You know the text is just as real if you read it from the screen? It's not about the text being "real", it's about the UI of printed pages versus screens. You can use the space around you, and leverage spatial reasoning, better with paper. You'd need multiple really big, digital-pen-input-ready, high-res screens, plus some very nice specialized software, to come close to the same experience with computers—and still only kinda, for some situations but not others. Or you can just print a few sheets of paper at pennies per sheet and have a couple pens and highlighters around. Physical paper is just another UI, and remains better for some things than screens are. Screens do have some advantages—you can't full-text-search the sheets of paper you have splayed over your desk or pinned up on the whiteboard or tackboard, of course, though given how good & fast OCR is getting, we might be able to do exactly that when AR eventually takes off. You can't have animations on a piece of paper. You can't back your paper up in the cloud. But you can also have ten pages visible all at once, with paper, and recall "I think that one part was somewhere to the top-left...". You can fold it. You can doodle on it. You can stuff it between relevant pages in a book. You can bundle related pages together with consistent ordering in a UI I that's quite nice for many purposes (AKA a binder). Put all those together and there are plenty of times printed pages beat screens (though, to emphasize again just to make this entirely clear, not always). > Paper is also annoying to deal with. I've had an e-reader for 10 years but the odd older book isn't available. You'd think based on comments online that a real book is some magical wonderful thing, but they're an ass to use, heavy, large to store. Their only virtue is that they look nice on a shelf. But the other thing that looks nice is something other than a shelf. From my perspective e-readers have exactly two killer features: space/weight savings (this one is, to be fair, a huge advantage, and is the only reason I have one), and not needing separate "large print" editions for readers with poor eyesight. The UI of paper books is, in practically every other way, better. Two pages visible at a time is great. Being able to easily hold open a couple different parts of the book at once is great. Full-text search is occasionally nice but a good index is, overall, better (to be fair, being an ebook doesn't rule out having a good index, but I find them far more awkward to use than in physical books). Commentary and notes and annotations and anything that leverages the fixed, physical space of the page, including things like thoughtful typesetting (especially noticeable with poetry) are all better in a real book. Endless customization is obviously nice in a lot of ways, but the flexibility of ebooks harm some use cases—it's no coincidence that a lot of non-fiction struggles with representation in e-book form, without resorting to fixed-size PDF. IMO ebooks aren't a book replacement, they're a totally new format, and creating content that best suits them won't be identical to creating content that best suits books, and books that are simply format-shifted to ebooks are bound (ha, ha) to suffer in some ways for it. The most apt comparison I can think of is the transition from scrolls to bound volumes. It's not hard to think of ways that scrolls would have been superior to codices, and while ultimately the latter may have been overall-better and certainly did win out, they weren't universally and in all ways better. Ultimately, the space-savings thing may win the day for ebooks (again, it is a huge advantage) and print books may largely vanish, but it won't be because ebooks are strictly superior formats for reading.
- zwieback 4y agoIt is dying but very slowly, still very profitable and pretty big business. hp's 4th quarter printing business was 4.5 billion with a 20% profit margin.
- alar44 4y agoI'm in manufacturing. We print probably 10k pages a day. Not everyone is a work from home app developer.
- SapporoChris 4y agohttps://www.sakura-house.com/sakura_tips/printing-and-copying-services-at-japanese-convenient-stores https://www.sakura-house.com/sakura_tips/printing-and-copyin... The revolution has already occurred in some places. If I need a print job there's a printer within five minutes walk from me, I actually have a couple of places I could walk to. It's less than 10 yen for black and white, 50 to 80 yen for color.
- nebula8804 4y agoJapan is still very paper based, makes sense that they can make this a viable business there but elsewhere? It seems like a stretch.
- aidenn0 4y agoI've put over 10000 of pages through my $150 laser printer at a consumables cost of about $0.02 per page, resulting in an amortized cost (including the printer) of $0.035 per page.