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Comment by mbell | Hacker News Reader

I haven't owned a printer in probably 10 years and I'm not particularly young (32).

I get their usefulness in some aspects of business operations but I'm a bit at a loss as to why an individual would purchase one.

What are the use cases now? The only two I can think of are printing photos, which I get but it seems better handled either through a photo printer or an outside service or for printing 'offical' documents to fill out manually, but I've completed many such transactions by digitally filling out and signing a pdf.

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There are a few.

Tickets. Boarding Passes. Government forms that cannot be filed electronically. Carrying information you need where you don't want to reply on a phone whose battery could run out.

To read something in a focused way, with no internet to distract you.

I printed out a plane ticket today to fly in a country where waving your phone with the same ticket is apparently not satisfactory.

It doesn't surprise me that there are edge cases where you need paper. It surprises me that those edge cases are numerous enough that you would own a printer and deal with it.

All of my boarding passes are covered via phone but on the occasion that I need a pass for an airline that doesn't have that option I would just spend 5 minutes at a kiosk to get it.

On the occasion I have to file a gov form that isn't available digitally or I can't fax (via email), I'll just get it printed at whatever local place can do so.

Point is that home printing really isn't a necessity anymore, and depending on circumstance it's debatable if it's a time/cost savings. As a result I would expect the home printing market to get more and more expensive.

I got my printer for something like $100 on Ebay, and it's ridiculously reliable and the cost per page is dirt cheap. Why would I want to waste my time driving somewhere and paying to print stuff when I can do it in a few seconds at home?

The home printing market is only going to get more and more expensive if consumers are so stupid they can't go buy small business printers on Ebay that are a few years old and off-lease.

True

Given most of us have a printer at work, it may be environmentally more efficient if we just print stuff at work.

That said I am disorganized enough that being able to print at the very last minute is kind of handy!

Printer makers must hate people who buy a $50 and use it once in a blue moon and hardly ever buy a cartridge.

Over the past few months:

* Printing tax forms (even if you do them electronically it is much easier to have a file folder of all your info should you get a query from the government) * Printing homework or practice questions for my kids * Printing registration forms for the many places that aren't computerized * Faxed identification for various purposes * Faxed contracts for real estate * Scanned documents and identification for people that accept them over email * Scanned expenses

And that's not including my wife's use of it, who is a student and will regularly print off stuff to mark up by hand.

> Printing tax forms (even if you do them electronically it is much easier to have a file folder of all your info should you get a query from the government)

I store them as PDFs and put them on a NAS that with backups to S3

> Printing registration forms for the many places that aren't computerized

Generally have found I can fill out the PDF and stamp a signature on it and it's fine.

> Faxed contracts for real estate

Same as above.

> Scanned *

Not a printer, I just use a phone app for 'scanning' documents.

Coupons. Forms that can't be accepted electronically. Shipping labels. Tickets. Letters one is going to mail.

At work I've actually printed out database queries before so I could take a pen and mark them all up.

i have a cheap brother b/w laser at home, and use slightly more expensive hp b/w lasers at work because they're faster.

at home i print things like movie and event tickets. i don't like fumbling around on my phone for tickets because sometimes there's no reception and the email or whatever isn't cached. occasionally i will have government paperwork or something to print from home also. i will also print out maps and lists when i know reception will be crappy.

basically, mandatory paperwork and shitty cell reception are my use cases.

For online tickets, you can usually download them. If not, I just take a screenshot (both Android and iOS have built-in support). I've traveled on Ryanair just fine using them.

For maps, there are plenty with offline support: Google Maps, HERE, OsmAnd, etc.

I'm not criticizing your approach, just saying that I've never felt that need. Official paperwork, on the other hand, is still a pain; our local governments seem particularly adverse to digital documents.

uh yeah, i understand you can use a phone offline. but i'm just not going to rely on my phone to get into a place that i traveled to get to. screenshot, offline, blah blah, what if the battery dies? what if the damn thing just stops working, like it has done multiple times in my life? what if someone snatches it from me while it's out in my hand like it normally is? what if someone spills a drink on it while it's out on the table at the dinner before the show?

how do you think i know of all these terrible scenarios?

i'd rather hang on to a piece of paper, and if i lose it, then i have nobody to blame but myself. call me a luddite.

No need to get defensive, I specifically said I wasn't criticizing the paper approach, just explaining why I don't worry about bad reception.

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