Ask HN: When did you stop using a printer and why?

I haven’t. I have a Brother laser printer that’s probably 10 years old now, if not closer to 15. I don’t use it frequently, but it comes in handy occasionally. My wife prints a little more than I do. Toner is cheap and lasts forever. I think I’ve been through 4-5 toner carts and 1 drum replacement.

If it died, I’d get another. As infrequently as I use one, when you need it it’s nice to have.

I stopped using photo printers after realizing I could not use them frequently enough to keep the inks from drying out. It was cheaper to pay a professional print place for the few times I needed a print.

I stopped using b&w printers for personal use when I got multiple monitors / a monitor big enough to show reference material + workspace. I still have a b&w laser for when hard copies are required by 3rd parties.

I still use one. It took me getting a HP color laser that did double-sided printing, with good network support - to enjoy printing. No "your yellow has run out, you can't print black" bullshit. I actually get a large number of pages per toner. The toners aren't joined.

It just works, and is reasonably fast enough for home use.

I find its really useful for organizing home things, printing off the odd invoice to mail a check in, role playing games, printing off sheet music, etc.

I don't use it daily or weekly, but when I use it I'm glad I have it. I like that my friends can connect easily on the network now without too much weird driver stuff. If they are on my wifi they can even print from their phone in general easily.

I just woke up one morning and realised the printers had been using me all along.

10 years ago. I’m in Japan and I go to the nearest convenience store, transfer the pdf document to the printer and get a clean print. I only use the printer for two pages a month to post the document, stamped with my company hanko, to a traditional Japanese big company.

The only time that I regret not having a printer is when it is pouring with rain on print day.

Why? Because dried up ink was a rip off.

Count me out. I still use a monochrome laser printer occasionally for personal business, and have fun covering the walls with prints from a big photo printer. James Webb's Neptune is the latest.

For me, a printer is vital when proofing checking important documents. Documents may read fine on the screen, but the moment you print them out all those nastily little errors become more apparent.

When my wife started working at a library 10 years ago. Now on the rare occasion I need one, I can just send the documents to their system for remote print, which gets billed to my library account, and she brings it home. I suspect many libraries have similar setups, except for the convenient door-to-door service part.

When I realised the same office supply place I bought print supplies from could simply do the prints. Or I could use the library, university, or work printers. It ended up being quicker and cheaper to outsource, plus I don't have another machine taking up valuable desk space.

Personally, 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 are generally intended for print form, and I prefer to print them out.

Also, with a good laser printer there is no need to stop printing. It took 10 years to use the toner cartridge in by Brother printer. I'm hoping for 10 more out of the new cartridge I just bought.

I have not. Working from home meant I needed a printer at home. Especially for official documents needed for travel.

The real question is "when did you stop using inkjet printers", the answer to which is "a long time ago". I got a Deskjet 500 when those were fresh and managed to never buy an "official" (i.e. expensive) cartridge for the thing, instead using a syringe+needle and a jar of fountain pen ink to refill the thing. When the local Aldi supermarket dumped some HP colour inkjets I got one and used it for a few weeks until the ink ran out. For that printer HP had learned their lesson and made it nigh impossible to refill the cartridge so back into the carton the printer went never to be used again. I reverted to the Deskjet 500 and fountain pen ink until I got a Laserjet 2200 DTN from some job which was about to throw it out because of a broken fuser sleeve. One new fuser sleeve later I entered the wondrous world of toner-based printers and never looked back. This is some 20 years ago now, the Laserjet still works but it recently got relegated to emergency duty when I got a Canon MF9220CDN for free due to similar reasons. One new black toner cartridge later we entered the wondrous world of toner-based colour copy-printers, we will see if we end up looking back. The thing is ridiculously over-specified for our use but since it only uses 1W in standby - less than the Laserjet - that does not really matter. It takes up space but makes good for that by including a scanner. A toner cartridge which is supposed to last for ~6000 pages (i.e. years worth of printing for us) costs around €20-€30, a full set of 4 around €80-90. I have 2 black cartridges so I'm set for a number of years...

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.

I never stopped. Tried iPads and a remarkable2 but never was able to beat how I read technical papers printed out and marked with pen/pencil.

I still print regularly. Most government offices are not entirely online yet and even those that are still have processes that require sending in signed papers. I also make use of the scanner on the printer to scan forms and archive them. I print legal documents all the time. I also print labels for shipping as my handwriting has become atrocious over time. Printing labels reduces risk of shipping errors and there is no harm in making a shippers life slightly easier. I also print labels when returning defective things purchased online.

As a side note my Brother Laserjet has been rock solid. knocks on wood It's the only printer that has stood the tests of time and usage thus far.

There is a company down the highway from me that can print things but then I have to email my documents to them. That is one more copy of the documents laying around on someones mail server and on their PC of unknown patched/security status.

I 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.

I believe the last time I printed something out was in 2011. I had been keeping a printer for years just to file my state taxes. In 2011, Intuit's Free File Fillable Forms became available not just for federal taxes, but for state taxes as well.

It never sat right with me that I should have to pay a private corporation to eFile my taxes, and they've always been simple enough that I didn't need a professional to prepare them, so I stubbornly printed them out and mailed them in every year. I didn't like that FFFF was provided by Intuit, but at least I wasn't giving them money directly.

Then, for the 2020 tax year, they stopped providing the service for state taxes, but I no longer have a working printer. I had to go to a local print shop to get everything printed out. It was still cheaper than eFile software, but it was a drag.

A 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.

I moved to Miami, and just didn't buy one when I moved down here.

In the rare occasion that I need to print, I'll swing by the business center in my condo building and print it out.

Ten years ago, maybe. Partially because they were impossible to configure. I have a Leenucks desktop and getting a HP or Brother laser printer to remember how to talk to it is like teaching pakleds warp field theory.

But mostly I stopped because there was a critical mass of people who seemed to be okay with me emailing PDFs.

If I need to print something, I email it to kinkos. I've probably spent $20 on printing there in the last 3 years so it probably saves money as well.

I 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.

I have vastly reduced the amount of printing I do. I do almost all of my reading on a tablet, for example. However, I do find that I'm more efficient at proofreading when I print out a draft, because I can write directly on it (and yes, I have an iPad Pro and a Thinkpad X1 Yoga, both with styli), attach PostIts, and the like.

I recently bought a high-yield toner cartridge for my laser printer, and hope to live long enough to need another.

I stopped owning a printer when the one I had in college stopped working, and I realized it was cheaper to pay 10-20 cents per page to print at the library on the rare occasion I needed to print something, than to buy a new printer and ink. And honestly, it was less of a hastle than printing with a cheap home printer too (at least since I go to the library fairly often anyways).

Oh and now I don't need space for a printer either.

100% of the things I need to print at home are things for the kids. I imagine once they are grown, I will never need to print anything again.

I didn't use my printer really often and inks were drying. I find it cheaper to go to a printing service near me. I now don't have to manage technical problems. It's sometimes complicated when I need urgently to print a document but I found solutions. You can for example add your sign on PDFs by modifying them.

My printer is now useful only as a scanner.

As a student I don't expect to be mostly done with one for the next couple years. Even once I'm done, I will still probably have an all-in-one copy/printer since I do occasionally require one for various things, such as making a copy of an important document, or whatnot.

I 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.

Printers (3-D teleportation! reanimation! duplication!) are sci-fi magic. Thanks to smartphone cameras, scanning and OCR are now free.

Using DRM-free ethernet-without-wifi Brother laser and Dymo label printers.

Looking into combo 3D printer / laser engraver / CNC cutter, to join the revolution in photogrammetry and Lidar cameras.

Several years ago, I can't remember exactly when. I simply don't have things I need to print anymore.

I need my printer at least once a year to print my state taxes (which don't have free e-file and I'm not paying Intuit a dime of I can help it). When it dies, I'll probably just start using the print shop.

I simply don't have much to print.

When I moved out of my parents place years ago, I never bought a printer. I printed stuff at work from time to time as needed, and over time, the need for printed paperwork diminished. The last major thing I use printers for is immigration paperwork.

I still use a printer regularly.

I haven't. In fact, I just bought a new toner cartridge for my black-and-white HP 426 MFP.

What I have stopped doing is using the fax section of that MFP. The last fax I sent was about 6 months ago.

Note: I probably do as much scanning as printing.

I 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.

I've not had one for a long time. My business has one, that's usually enough for me.

But I've recently been thinking about getting one. I want to print templates for doing woodworking & similar in the shop.

I have a Xerox color laser I got for cheap. It sucks, and I found out after purchase that Xerox had sold me a broken refurbished machine, but the replacement mostly works. Print quality is pretty decent.

I use printers for reading technical papers and sometimes code documentation. I use a brother laserjet, I hate it because I have to use a USB because the wifi connection never seems to work properly

After I brought my first iPad I realised that I was reviewing documents using the iPad rather than paper. I just stopped printing after that.

I've actually never owned my own printer until recently purchasing a B&W laser, it's used exclusively for sheet music.

About 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

It’s been at least 13 years. Weekly airline commuting forced me to eliminate paper to avoid hauling it with me.

When I started signing PDF documents with a graphic tablet instead of printing, signing and scanning them each time.