The Argument Against the Printer

Something that boggles my mind regularly is the need for hard copies of documents. While I will grant you some legal documents like wills and whatnot still need to be hard copy, having your phone bill hard copy is not. Despite my best efforts, signing up for e-mailing and downloading my bank statements online, I still get things hard copy mailed to me. I don’t like keeping paper as much as humanly possible. The question becomes, why keep a printer in your home anymore? Many people have printers, and many people use them, but I don’t see the point anymore.

1) Who prints things off anymore? – With the world the way it is today, needing physical copies of things is becoming more and more irrelevant. Touch screen technology allows us to sign documents if you’re going to communicate with someone you’re more likely to e-mail or text, and all of our bills are given to us electronically. Even tickets to things like sporting events and concerts you can get on an app now. There is simply no requirement to print off documents because we have such an electronic infrastructure which allows us to do everything that we did before but without the hindrance of paper.

2) The ink drys out (Super expensive) – For the moment, whenever my kids are printing things off for school, they use the printer in our house. With the printer that we used to have, this was a costly proposition. The issue is that the ink in our old printer would dry up in the cartridges because it was used so infrequently. The printer’s primary purpose is to provide quality documents, but because (certainly in our house) it is not used, it is not useful. For the times that we would need it, I would have to go out and buy new cartridges which would always drive me a little crazy, spending up to forty dollars on something that would only be used once or twice.

3) Takes up additional space – I can’t claim to have the cleanest of desks. Currently, mine has a couple of external hard drives, my scanner and a full cup of coffee on it. If you need to find space for a printer along with everything else on your desk, it will very likely take over the bulk of the area on your office. Computers get smaller and smaller, and the physical footprint that they require becomes less and less. Printers, on the other hand, are not able to reduce their size any more than they already have. Even the “smallest” of printers are nearly as big as desktop towers. Depending on your living space, you may not be able to accommodate both. Of course, if you can’t fit a computer and a printer in your home office, you DEFINITELY don’t have enough room to store the paper your printing off anyway.

The printer, not unlike the butter churn, has had its day. Now, however, with technology progressing the way that it is, there is no real need for one anymore. I can, to a certain degree understand how people felt the need to print things t5o sign them, but with touch technology progressing the way that it has been, there will be no need to print things off to sign then, we can use touch screens and stylus’ to make our mark. If you need to read a document, most screens nowadays come with some “easy reader” setting. I will give exemptions to students on this one. I have printed off things that I’ve had to hand into my teachers/professors, but even now the drop boxes of old that you would be able to drop your paper off in are being replaced with e-mail inboxes that you can e-mail your assignment too. It is a personal choice if you would like to have a printer in your home or not. While I do have one in my house, I don’t use it; It’s for my kids (who are students…). I think that we will find fewer reasons to keep printers around and more and more reasons to go completely digital.

Do you have a printer in your home?

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