Printing equipment overall seems to be a particularly shameful part of our electronic era — printers have for the longest time been hard to configure, find drivers for. They are archaically large, haven’t progressed much in the past decade and by virtue of their purpose (converting digital documents into paper) stand in the way of innovation.

I’m particularly frustrated, however, not by printers themselves (which I’m inclined to treat as necessary evil), but by the way people use them. Printing today should be rare, limited to instances when you don’t have access to an electronic form of the document (and such instances such be more and more rare — most people take their laptops with them when they travel so “printing documents for the road” is no longer a valid excuse). Printing should also be double-sided — we could be halving the rate at which trees are cut down if only we set that to be our default mode of printing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 13:45 and is filed under The Daily Badness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.