Never. 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.
Ask HN: When did you stop using a printer and why?
11–20 of 78 posts
Re: Ask HN: When did you stop using a printer and why?
#12I 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.
Re: Ask HN: When did you stop using a printer and why?
#13About 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
Re: Ask HN: When did you stop using a printer and why?
#14I 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.
Re: Ask HN: When did you stop using a printer and why?
#15Personally, 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…
Uh, which Brother printer is this? We probably go through a cartridge every several months.
2270DW. We print a few hundred pages a year and the cartridge has a page yield of 2,600 @ 5% Coverage
Re: Ask HN: When did you stop using a printer and why?
#16When I started signing PDF documents with a graphic tablet instead of printing, signing and scanning them each time.
Re: Ask HN: When did you stop using a printer and why?
#17A 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.
Re: Ask HN: When did you stop using a printer and why?
#18I 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
My daughter, who is 17, also needs to use the printer occasionally for school.
Re: Ask HN: When did you stop using a printer and why?
#19I 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.
Re: Ask HN: When did you stop using a printer and why?
#20When I started signing PDF documents with a graphic tablet instead of printing, signing and scanning them each time.
That 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.