Tech Wiz musing on printers….

I have had a plotter, or a large format printer for many years. Originally I had HP plotters, in fact, I only had HP printers in the house. I switched to a Canon laser printer and later the Canon plotter a few years ago. I don’t own anything made by HP except the advanced programmable calculator I have from the days of old. I keep that to remind me of the way things used to be calculated. Also, I keep it because I loved using it! Plotters are interesting devices. You don’t normally share the lower end plotters on your network. You do share the higher end large format printers. The inkjet variety of plotters has ink that lasts about four months, so they are more expensive printers than a normal printer. They don’t always cost a huge amount of money, but the ink is expensive.

The reality of printers though, is that people just don’t have as many printers now as they used to. Back when I first started in computers, we often had one computer per workstation if that workstation needed to print. There were people back then that printed everything. They would receive an email, print it, read it and then go back to the computer and reply. Then they would often print the reply to their reply. It was a vicious cycle. Lots of paper wasted. The emergence of portable electronic documents (like Abobe Acrobat) allowed for more and more digital-only files, but there are still those who like to print the documents they receive.  They are not wrong; they are just used to the old model.

I do still have the Canon Pixma photo printer. I use that one for printing pictures that I share with people. I share digital pictures with those that like those. But there are people that still like to hold pictures so on occasion I use my canon photo printer and print the picture for them. I have used that printer twice in the past year. I have used the plotter once in the past year. At some point, I will get rid of my plotter and the photo printer. Not yet mind you, but soon. I do still like being able to print large format Visio diagrams. At some point, I suspect I will have the last printer I ever buy. From then on it will be easier to just send the electronic version of the document and no longer print anything. Someday, that will be true I am sure.