The Paper Printer Will Be Dead in Four Years, says IEEE

Poseur said:
At home I've been using my printer less and less, though. I started printing to PDF archives after spending DAYS shredding old documents. I'm nowhere near paperless yet though.
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Best way to go as long as you backup your computer files.

I not only print most stuff to PDF (unless I actually need a hard copy), I also scan any paperwork I might need and then shred it.

Years ago I was at the point where I needed another file cabinet, so instead I bought a double sided scanner and started scanning any paperwork I might need and then shredding it. I try to keep very little paper, and even emptied out half the file cabinet I already had. 10 years worth scans (I even scan at 300DPI for better quality), and I'm barely at 1GB.
 
Liger88 said:
<snip>Probably one of the worst consumer devices we've ever seen that has gone absolutely nowhere in the past 20 years. In fact I'd say things have got worse. My dot-matrix never failed me once. It was loud, it rocked the desk, it was slow, and only did black and white. Even then it was the best damn printer I ever owned.
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Dot matrix porn was terrible. Only fools buy ink jet. HP 4L now what, 20 years old? and still using the same cartridge. Color gets printed at a commercial print shop with a way better than I can afford color laser printer.
Paper isn't going away. Ever. There's always going to be something you need a hard document copy of.
 
As a business owner, all I have to say is: ya, right.

It is no equivalent to the simplicity of marking up a piece of paper in a board room with colleagues.

Ipad and sharpie don't exactly mix!
 
Good riddance! :D

7Wkv7cY.jpg
 
heatlesssun said:
Pretty much everything that can done with paper in terms of communicating information can be done digitally and in many ways far better than paper ever could. Food not so much.
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Yea, they are going to strap iPads to cereal boxes and the like.
 
The printer should be dead, but it wont be. Companies love to print stuff and in government it's even mandated for some stuff. Fax is actually considered more secure than electronic transmission by the government. Hospitals fax and print A LOT.

If anything when computers became mainstream it probably increased paper use, not decrease it.
 
We have an architectural office also offering a wide range of services property related.


I can't imagine not printing drawings and lots of other documents for the construction sites anytime soon. The huge paper sheets produced by our plotters can not be viewed in a team meeting otherwise. Unless we all get portable huge military grade, heavy duty MS Surface screens for cheap....
 
I don't see what people are bitching about. I've never had a printer fail. Inkjet sucks but if you print a lot out can get ink in bottles and run lines from the bottles to the printer. I saw this a lot in China. Personally I've been using a laser printer since 2008. I'm in my PhD now and have a wireless laser printer that does 20+ pages a minute double sided. That is an improvements over the brother printer i had in '08. Not sure where people are getting this "no improvements from". If I wasn't a student I would buy a nice wireless all in one, laser color printer. Printers are advancing nicely. laser + color + networked + wireless + double sided + all-in-one + speed. Plenty of improvements.
 
HAHAHAAHA

They also said paper use would go down years ago yet studies showed instead it went up. I work in a place where people constantly print what could easily be read online. No 4 years is way too soon. I seriously get tons of people who argue with me non stop that reading on paper works better than on a screen. Paper will never go away until an entire generation grows up with mobile electronics in their hands. Its not about reason its not about costs its about people doing what they are used to and the only way for that to change is when people who do things that way leave the workforce.

BTW I hate printers. Unreliable, garbage drivers, over priced ink, most are missing needed features to save the environment like duplexing. Seriously duplexing should be default and on every printer by law.

I still get clowns who offer to fax me stuff.
 
silk186 said:
I don't see what people are bitching about. I've never had a printer fail. Inkjet sucks but if you print a lot out can get ink in bottles and run lines from the bottles to the printer. I saw this a lot in China. Personally I've been using a laser printer since 2008. I'm in my PhD now and have a wireless laser printer that does 20+ pages a minute double sided. That is an improvements over the brother printer i had in '08. Not sure where people are getting this "no improvements from". If I wasn't a student I would buy a nice wireless all in one, laser color printer. Printers are advancing nicely. laser + color + networked + wireless + double sided + all-in-one + speed. Plenty of improvements.
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ROFL you are the luckiest person around.

Lets see my printer at work takes like 4 minutes to start a job, sure it can probably do 20 pages a minute after the 4 minute start up. But where I come from I call that 4 pages a minute. Seriously why is it that a dumb printer takes longer to start than ANY freaking electronic device I own. Cartridges are constantly "low" when they still have ink in them. We have had to result to blocking the sensor to make the thing STFU. Drivers are so inconsistent some things simply wont print or work on one machine running the same OS when they will on another. That's a brother laser printer and for over a year it just spews out yellow ink on half the page.

You call networking an advancement that's been around for a decade. Since 08 I have been through 3 printers at home. And I hardly ever print at home. And almost all of them had at least 1 non essential function fail. So while it still printed we were often forced to hack around it. For instance our stupid HP workforce freaking wouldn't let you do anything at the printer itself due to a memory card error. So for over a year we had to command it to do everything even as simple as making a copy from a computer. So glad the software engineers at HP decided it would be great to make any remedial error completely inhibit you from doing any other function with the printer. I was happy when the print head jammed and was unfixable.
 
Uhm...yeah. No printing. In a pig's eye.

At a SINGLE one of the Dr's practices I work for, we are currently averaging around 170K pages printed annually -- and it has only been going up, courtesy of all the be-damned HIPAA handouts for patients, forms we have to print for them to fill out, etc.

Then, add to this the stupidity of most EMR's.

Case in point, most EMR's have absolutely no way to store lab results except in scanned form (because that is how the labs send them back, and every lab is different). This means you can look at *1* set of results at a time on screen -- perhaps more if you jump through hoops and print the scan to PDF and then open that rather than trying to view it in the EMR.

The problem is, when doctors look at lab results, they often NEED to see ALL of patients lab results side by side to be able to see trends and to compare them visually. You CAN'T DO THIS on a typical EMR system.

So....

Practice #1 that I deal with: has been printing out copies of each patients lab results and workups to give to the doctor before he goes in to see the patient -- and then shredding them after the visit. So, with an EMR, the use of paper has basically quadrupled.

Practice #2 that I also deal with: has the EMR system, as mandate by the law for Medicare, etc. They also still maintain a fully identical set of classic, printed medical records in filed folders for each patient -- just as they always have. The doctor still takes all his notes by hand. At the end of the day, one of the secretaries simply scans the doctor's notes and any new information per patient into the EMR system and then files the original hand-written copies back into the patients file. So, yes, to be in compliance with Medicare, etc. they have an EMR system and the patients records are stored in it. That said, to my knowledge, I don't think anyone actually ever looks at it.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
That's very common. Though fax never made up a measureable percentage of printed goods anyway.
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You've obviously never worked for a Dr's office -- where 70 page faxes per patient are commonplace.

E-mail would be a wonderful change for us, but, guess what, unless the transmitter and receiver can agree on a standard for encryption and guarantee receipt of the material, you cannot legally send medical records or any other PHI via e-mail (courtesy of HIPAA).

So, in house, we can send e-mails.
To the very few other offices that have the same setup for encryption and e-mail that we have, we can send and receive e-mails.
To everyone else, we have to use the blasted fax machine.
Which, is, honestly, probably less secure, because all we know is that the machine on the other end received it -- we have no clue WHO actually picked up the printed copy.
But, HIPAA has specifically looser encryption/reception requirements for data transmitted by fax or transmitted orally (i.e. by phone or even voice mail) -- because all these technologies existed prior to HIPAA and couldn't readily comply with it.
So, basically, all Doctor's offices still do everything either orally or via PRINTED fax -- because it is damned near impossible to do it legally otherwise.

Is it better this way? NO
Is it more secure this way? NO
Does HIPAA have anything to do with ACTUALLY making things better or more secure? NO!
 
rudy said:
HAHAHAAHA

They also said paper use would go down years ago yet studies showed instead it went up. I work in a place where people constantly print what could easily be read online. No 4 years is way too soon. I seriously get tons of people who argue with me non stop that reading on paper works better than on a screen. Paper will never go away until an entire generation grows up with mobile electronics in their hands. Its not about reason its not about costs its about people doing what they are used to and the only way for that to change is when people who do things that way leave the workforce.

BTW I hate printers. Unreliable, garbage drivers, over priced ink, most are missing needed features to save the environment like duplexing. Seriously duplexing should be default and on every printer by law.

I still get clowns who offer to fax me stuff.
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Paper isn't going anywhere, anytime soon. It will be reduced but never fully eliminated until it's replaced somehow.

Inkjets are usually garbage, laser printers in general are usually of higher quality and imho design.

I prefer lasers when they work well and print at a reasonable speed. B&W is sufficient for most home use and color laser printing can be done at a shop if needed.


10-20 years maybe we might reduce the need of paper significantly depending on social needs for paper.
 
I speak for laser printers too, they are also garbage. The laser printers are work are a constant nightmare. Every time we buy a new one we are like well I hate that last brand we used so lets try a new one..... The new one has problems too.

Anyhow suggest away people because we are about to pick out ANOTHER laser printer for work.
 
BTW I hate to say this but in a lot of areas in the USA the consumers have moved much faster than organizations who are suppose to be leading the trends. IMO printers are one of them. I see in homes where people actually you know have to pay for their printing, they are more conservative of their use. But businesses have done nothing. In fact I see people all the time wait till they go to work to print their personal stuff.
 
I work in a 500 bed hospital, I am responsible for 1 floor of it that holds about 50 patients. I go through in excess of 10,000 pages of paper a week from our fax machines and copiers. yup, paper's going away any day now!

oh, and a shit ton of post-it notes.
 
mdburkey said:
You've obviously never worked for a Dr's office -- where 70 page faxes per patient are commonplace.

E-mail would be a wonderful change for us, but, guess what, unless the transmitter and receiver can agree on a standard for encryption and guarantee receipt of the material, you cannot legally send medical records or any other PHI via e-mail (courtesy of HIPAA).

So, in house, we can send e-mails.
To the very few other offices that have the same setup for encryption and e-mail that we have, we can send and receive e-mails.
To everyone else, we have to use the blasted fax machine.
Which, is, honestly, probably less secure, because all we know is that the machine on the other end received it -- we have no clue WHO actually picked up the printed copy.
But, HIPAA has specifically looser encryption/reception requirements for data transmitted by fax or transmitted orally (i.e. by phone or even voice mail) -- because all these technologies existed prior to HIPAA and couldn't readily comply with it.
So, basically, all Doctor's offices still do everything either orally or via PRINTED fax -- because it is damned near impossible to do it legally otherwise.

Is it better this way? NO
Is it more secure this way? NO
Does HIPAA have anything to do with ACTUALLY making things better or more secure? NO!
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+1.

we need a secure medical document exchange protocol desperately.

Case in point, we had a pediatric patient that was being flown to a higher level of care, but the neurologist needed a set of MRI images on the patient from a previous admission at another facility that was 45 minutes from us to send with the patient. The ONLY way to get those images was for the other hospital to burn them to disk and send them via an emergency courier before the helicopter left with the patient from our hospital.

those records should have been available to be viewed anywhere in the country on the net. I need records, I have to FAX a request for release of information with the patients consents to the other facility, and hope it's not an emergency on a holiday or a weekend, because most medical records departments are closed then! :rolleyes:
 
heatlesssun said:
Pretty much everything that can done with paper in terms of communicating information can be done digitally and in many ways far better than paper ever could. Food not so much.
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I can't wait for my digital butt wiper. I know there is an alternative to that but I couldn't resist.
Joke aside, I think cost alone will keep some things paper. When I type that I'm looking at the picture on my wall. That would look very good on a screen but the cost means it won't be happening anytime soon. It would be great if it were doable because that would let me change the view to suit my mood.
 
mjz_5 said:
lol.. yea sure.. i work for the government.. they love printing and they still fax.. LOL
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Insurance industry, too. What would you ink-sign without paper? A floppy label? Cuz that's paper, too.


heatlesssun said:
Pretty much everything that can done with paper in terms of communicating information can be done digitally and in many ways far better than paper ever could. Food not so much.
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Psssst... fingers are known as "digits".
 
surfhick said:
I can't wait for my digital butt wiper. I know there is an alternative to that but I couldn't resist.
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heatlesssun said:
Pretty much everything that can done with paper in terms of communicating information can be done digitally and in many ways far better than paper ever could. Food not so much.
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I've this particular conversation about physical versus digital paper a lot and almost inevitably toilet paper comes up, so I try to remember to stipulate the condition I highlighted in yellow.

surfhick said:
Joke aside, I think cost alone will keep some things paper. When I type that I'm looking at the picture on my wall. That would look very good on a screen but the cost means it won't be happening anytime soon. It would be great if it were doable because that would let me change the view to suit my mood.
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Digital paper is probably cheaper than physical paper in many cases today. A device like the Dell Venue 8 Pro, comes with OneNote 2013, a 64 GB model with a pen and an additional 64 GB of storage comes in around $400. Let's say that an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper costs 1/4 of a cent, which I believe is on the extreme low end of the usual cost. That's about 160,000 pages of paper for $400 and I believe that should easily be doable within 64 GB with OneNote. But since OneNote pages can store much more than just ink, text, images, audio, video, web content, files, a OneNote page can have MUCH richer content than a physical piece of paper, the page count per storage space is much more variable than plain paper. Nonetheless, many thousands of digital pages are far more transportable than physical paper pages and additionally much cheaper and easier to backup and archive.

Paper is an ancient tool of humanity, but in time we generally replace bulky, analog forms of storage and content create with digital ones. Typewriters to word processors, where many documents never get printed. Vinyl and even CDs with totally digital cloud stores and streams, likewise with DVDs, etc. Paper has just been around much longer and the digital methods of replacing paper are just finally getting interesting and cost effective enough .
 
heatlesssun said:
I've this particular conversation about physical versus digital paper a lot and almost inevitably toilet paper comes up, so I try to remember to stipulate the condition I highlighted in yellow.
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A lot of government printing conveys just about as much information as the toilet paper does -- and smells very similar as well!
 
rudy said:
I speak for laser printers too, they are also garbage. The laser printers are work are a constant nightmare. Every time we buy a new one we are like well I hate that last brand we used so lets try a new one..... The new one has problems too.

Anyhow suggest away people because we are about to pick out ANOTHER laser printer for work.
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I managed over 300 deployed printers, mostly of HP brand. We have Samsung, Lexmark, and HP color laser printers (3 different models for HP). The rest of our printers comprise of HP LaserJet M401n, 1320dn, 4250/4350, P2015/2035/2055, and a few MFC 3015 models.

Based on what you wrote with the selection of vocabulary used, I think something is wrong in your environment. Laser technology for printing is revolutionary compared to inkjets, and every printer I have tried out of a few dozen different models across HP, Brother, Lexmark, Samsung, Savin, and Kyocera all work great and do what they're supposed to. Inkjets on the other hand all need to go die in an active volcano's cavity; they're slow, spontaneously decide when they want to take a 5 minute break (including in the middle of a job), ink cartridges often wind up costing more than the printer / add up enough to justify a new printer every quarter or two, and are problematic as far as drivers and compatibility go on enterprise print servers.

We use Windows Server 2008/'12 VMs serving as print servers. At least with 2008, management of printer drivers with the ability to isolate drivers has gotten significantly better than 2003 -- good heavens, we once replaced a 2003 box with another 2003 box due to performance reasons and I had to deal with DLL hell for 2 weeks day-in-day-out before I called it quits and told my supervisor and co-workers it's their turn.

If your environment is setup correctly and properly, you shouldn't have any problems with virtually almost all laser printers that are common to get hold of.
 
OEM said:
I really wish I got paid for making idiotic predictions. This person is a fucking moron.
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This. The same was said about faxing in the 80s. It's still here and finally almost close to being removed from our operations.
 
heatlesssun said:
The big bank I work for has done a pretty good job at eliminating paper across the board, from both internal and external operations. We went to laptops and multiple monitor docking stations in a direct effort to eliminate paper and with the vast geography that we cover, paper is often pointless anyway.

Of course paper will be around for ages to come,but it certainly isn't nearly as necessary or even wanted as just a decade ago.
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My company took up a paperless initiative a couple years back and it's gone pretty well (also have docking stations and multiple monitors). Only time we use the printers is when a hard copy needs to go out to a client which is not that often.
 
Red Squirrel said:
If anything when computers became mainstream it probably increased paper use, not decrease it.
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This x1000.

Computers have generated far more paper than they are replaced. Maybe 10+ years from now we'll start to see an actual decline in paper output. Probably 30+ years before paper is mostly gone.
 
heatlesssun said:
A device like the Dell Venue 8 Pro, comes with OneNote 2013, a 64 GB model with a pen and an additional 64 GB of storage comes in around $400. Let's say that an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper costs 1/4 of a cent, which I believe is on the extreme low end of the usual cost. That's about 160,000 pages of paper for $400 and I believe that should easily be doable within 64 GB with OneNote. But since OneNote pages can store much more than just ink, text, images, audio, video, web content, files, a OneNote page can have MUCH richer content than a physical piece of paper, the page count per storage space is much more variable than plain paper.
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Sure, the electronic device has the potential to be much more powerful. No doubt.

But consider the cost of training Joe Schmoe to use it effectively, as I'm sure you envision in your scenario, vs the cost of training somebody to use a sheet of paper.

Maybe I'm just jaded because I work daily with people who thing Excel is to be used for word processing (it does tables! durr), but them's the shakes.
 
Xee said:
My company took up a paperless initiative a couple years back and it's gone pretty well (also have docking stations and multiple monitors). Only time we use the printers is when a hard copy needs to go out to a client which is not that often.
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Virtually all of the documents we deal with are Office based or PDFs, there really is no need to print anything unless you don't have a computer which is why everyone has laptops now. The other big reason for printing is to be able to view multiple things simultaneously, thus the push for multiple monitors. Sure people still print but it very rare for anyone these days at work to hand out a printed document, in fact I can't remember the last time I've been given anything printed at work.
 
Teitoku said:
Sure, the electronic device has the potential to be much more powerful. No doubt.

But consider the cost of training Joe Schmoe to use it effectively, as I'm sure you envision in your scenario, vs the cost of training somebody to use a sheet of paper.

Maybe I'm just jaded because I work daily with people who thing Excel is to be used for word processing (it does tables! durr), but them's the shakes.
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I don't think the cost of training the average person to use something like OneNote comes anywhere close to the cost and efficiency gains. The beauty of OneNote is that it is virtually a digital representation of a paper notebook with tabs and folders, something that anyone dealing with large amounts of paper is familiar with. Through in the easy ability to scan, email, make copies, search, etc., the time to learn the fundamentals is easily recovered in just how much is simplified versus using paper.
 
MajorDomo said:
According to a spokesman from the IEEE, the paper printer will be going the way of all things old school and heading for obscurity within the next four years. If they are right, the prediction of a paperless future will be one step closer, just taking a little longer than predicted.
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This idea is 20 years old and were no closer than we were the.
 
rudy said:
I speak for laser printers too, they are also garbage. The laser printers are work are a constant nightmare. Every time we buy a new one we are like well I hate that last brand we used so lets try a new one..... The new one has problems too.

Anyhow suggest away people because we are about to pick out ANOTHER laser printer for work.
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Do you stop buying the staples source POS printers for cheap with total disregard for duty cycle? Or do you just have an insane duty cycle. Where I work, we have some serious printing demands. We have had trouble finding vendors who have numbers near our service levels and are willing to warranty stuff. But our paper budget is also in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, so.... if we can find something that works well, I'm pretty sure most people can.

Almost everything at the local staples/office depot are essentially disposable unless you don't print too much. Landscaper, contractor, plumber? PRobably good enough. Lawyers office? Might be cost effective if you treat them as disposable and buy on supplies costs and average across several printers without changing make and model.
 
The author of the article obviously knows no one who works in government, manufacturing, education, health care, the legal system, law enforcement and on and on and on.

Come to think of it, it sounds like the author never leaves his parent's basement. :rolleyes:
 
mavrocket said:
The author of the article obviously knows no one who works in government, manufacturing, education, health care, the legal system, law enforcement and on and on and on.

Come to think of it, it sounds like the author never leaves his parent's basement. :rolleyes:
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Exactly...some industries require a "paper trail."
 
kirbyrj said:
Exactly...some industries require a "paper trail."
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It is that silly belief that having all these signed documents with disclosures and legal jargon all over them is going to somehow protect a company from litigation. It rarely ever does since judges see past that crap.
 
shade91 said:
It is that silly belief that having all these signed documents with disclosures and legal jargon all over them is going to somehow protect a company from litigation. It rarely ever does since judges see past that crap.
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On the law enforcement side, if a defense attorney doesn't see a paper copy of my report, he's going to throw a shit fit.
 
lolz tell something like this to the ee's that work in the medical facility that I support and they will all either have heart attacks or die laughing.
 
I say bollocks to this, just like physical media was supposed to have died ten years ago, and the paperless office was supposed to have been a reality twenty years ago.
 
nutzo said:
You really need to stop buying the cheapest junk printers you can find and pay a little bit more for major brand that is a little better made.
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^This. The best thing I ever did for printing was buy an office laser jet for home. When I need photos I pay walgreens to print them for 10 cents.
 
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