Interesting that just under 20% of all printouts are from MS Word and no doubt a fair amount of the remaining printing in business would be reports (Excel/Accounting etc.) for internal transfer within the company, slowly more and more clients are using CMS (Content Management Systems) for storing documents securely and making them available anytime anywhere securely.

Here at base I have a printer plugged into the network and I honestly cannot remember the last time I printed a page with it. I use it to scan in important snail mail that arrives to store electronically and that is it. Documents I print to PDF or a compatible format that I know the intended recipient will be able to view and it goes out via e-mail or gets checked into a clients CMS system.

Photo’s that I want to share get uploaded to Flickr and the private family photos go into a private set at Flickr that only my family can access or shared with others with a custom URL for the private image provided by Flickr for users without a Yahoo! Account. And if out and about the Philips Digital Photo frame can come along for a ride loaded up with the images required on a SD Card. If the images are to be packed together for friends and family then a DVD movie is quickly whipped up with the relevant images from my photo collection.

Webpage’s I tag and save to del.icio.us and again if they are for my eyes only they are saved as private and if I feel a need to have a printout of the page then I typically e-mail the entire webpage to myself as the content is indexed and I can find it quickly using Windows Search.

Apart from the ‘Postie’ I am close to that so called ‘Paperless Office’ though I won’t be throwing out that printer anytime soon just in case I do need to print something for a ‘snail-mail’ delivery or that latest special image of a niece or nephew that needs to go into a real photo frame.

Probably after some future recommendations by Ananda regarding the new Kodak printers the thought of a new printer will stay away for quite some time and until the current HP gets used again and requires a refill the printing budget will remain very small.

The best way for Printer companies to encourage Increased Printer use would be to make printers more reliable and use standardized drivers.
Whenever something gets printed in our household (we have two Canons; an i450 on a Windows Machine and an i865 on an Airport) it's always a fight as the printers complain about non-existent problems with Vague Error Messages in Proprietary Dialogue Boxes. It happens mainly on the Windows Machine, but also on the Macs.
Both Microsoft Windows and CUPS support very extensive Printer Management API's so there is *no* reason to develop non-standard Drivers; unless you want to relentlessly announce that the printer that is *not* printing the users document is made by *this* company, who's company logo is *this* big.

It'd help also if people in businesses didn't feel the need to print out all their emails... both received AND ONES THEY'VE SENT!

Waste of paper, waste of toner, waste of time. Seriously, Why?

Seriously, Why?

Simple Chris... Traditional or bad habits call it what you will. The mindset of many is that we need everything in triplicate. One for me, one for them and one for the filing cabinet.

Digital Electronic archives stored on backup media (Tape/DVD/Server/OffSite) still in many mindsets hold as a 'Business Practice' and thus it gets archived into big steel boxes with drawers that pull out and never seen again until an audit or decisions come around that involve purchasing more steel monsters with drawers.

I wholeheartedly agree with the practise of printing emails - what a waste ...
I have noticed on the email footer of some companies, they add a brief message at the bottom in the form of "think about the environment before you print this email - is it really necessary?"

I in a retail environment, I personally think there'll most likely always be a need for some form of paper based documents, whether its for receipts, packing list labels or tax invoices... people like to have proof of purchase documentation when they buy something.

As far as digital photo frames go, yeah I think they're definitely going to go a long way to promote use of digital cameras, and maybe make a dent in sales of those specialist photo only printers.