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Dying technologies: do you still use a printer much?

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Paul Keith:
The printer may be dying but it may become the next killer app.

Imagine if e-book readers become cheap enough. You can develop a cheap stand-alone e-paper page where instead of printing on paper, it prints out the contents into your e-book. (The emphasis is on cheap because the hardware cannot be an e-book reader, it can only store temporary data like paper.)

Now after you read it, you can put it back on the printer and it will delete the data. The catch is that it has a large enough storage data to support 10000 pages.

Now if you want a higher priced model, you can buy a model that can be folded out or be portable or be extra durable. In fact, you can save all the costs for the additional features of an e-book reader and instead get a 5-10 set of these that is much easier in the hand to hold and much more durable.

You could even pursue getting back the dividends from these by supporting for digital rental libraries where people can just insert one of these and borrow a book from a database. Catch being it is read until you delete.

It may not be the next generation of tablet pcs/cellphone hybrids or e-book readers but I'd rather get one of these if the cost differential is different enough compared to the cost of those other portable hardware.

...but of course it has a major flaw of not having wi-fi but still... better reason to make it cheap.

crossesfour:
I still use my color printer every day or so when needed, and my Brother laser constantly.  I am an accountant, produce a lot of paper.  Also my teenage daughter often prints assignments and projects for school.

MilesAhead:
When I was playing around with Linux I did a lot of printing.  The books were expensive but you could get postscript files online for manuals like Bind and others.  I had an HP Deskjet 500 and got some software to interpret the postscript and also print on both sides of the page.  Then I put the stuff in 3 ring binders.  PDF was just coming in then and Linux was all about postscript.

Now I mostly print out a shopping list or a map to take with me when driving to an unfamiliar place.
Also with spiffy compilers and IDEs with source formatting, I don't want to look at source code on paper anymore.  I can remember printing that off on fanfold paper with a lame dot matrix(not that dot matrix is inherently lame, but this particular printer sure was!! The ribbons were dry when new!! Not easy on the eyes reading that crap!)

I think with cheap storage the printing of the general public has decreased but financial institutions especially still believe if it's on a hard copy people won't argue.  Any of the investment houses generate palettes of paper stuck in warehouses.  If somebody claims the transaction in the record isn't accurate, and they won't believe anything else, they drag out the indexes and hunt down the box with the paper record.  I don't think that will go away in my lifetime.

rno2:
I couple of years ago I bought a Kodak 5300. I don't use it to print much text though. I do print a large number of photos. And I use it to scan all my documents so that I have a digital backup of them. For this printer the ink is cheap and make photo printing reasonable.
I think that the last time I really used a printer to print out documents was probably somewhere in the 1990s.

frankfw:
I have decreased printer use by about 90. I create pdf files and either read on screen or on my Palm Centro. Many of the articles I used to print were related to work and filed in a cabinet after reading. I have eliminated 90%+ of the paper files and save them on my hard drive.

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