OT: Printer Suggestions

[ethan.boston-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (Ethan Schwartz)]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 5:45 PM, Daniel Feenberg <feenberg-fCu/yNAGv6M at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> While it is clear that a big printer is better and cheaper per page
> printed, that ignores the fact that the demand for pages printed will be
> much higher with a fast central printer than a slow local printer. People
> will send of 60 page prints just to see what is in them when the printer
> is fast and 50 feet away. If it is local and a minute per page, they will
> think twice. (I am not saying they won't ever print, just that often they
> won't).
>

I believe people are generally lazy, and so the effort of having to
actually get off their butts to pick up their print outs will keep
them from bothering to print something unless they actually need a
hard-copy (it certainly does for me! :))

At my last company we had fast central printers, and a few folks had
personal-size laser printers at their desks.  The ones with printers
only an arms length away tended to be the ones who were constantly
printing out emails, etc, and generally treating print outs as an
extension of their monitor real estate--often tossing those print outs
in the trash/recycle bin within an hour of printing them.

As further proof of laziness, one issue we had at that same company w/
the central printers was abandoned print jobs--people would send
something out to print (sometimes large documents, or even
personal/confidential items) and then never pick them up.  The print
outs would hang around--usually being read by whoever was standing
there waiting for their own print out--and eventually would be
recycled.  The semi-solution to that problem was to utilize the
'mailbox' feature our large printers had: Jobs went into your personal
PIN protected mailbox on the printer when "printed", then you then had
to physically walk to the printer, enter your PIN and select the job
to be printed--of course even despite the fact that these were 50+PPM
printers that still didn't stop some of the truly "A-D-D" afflicted
folks from wandering away during that minute or so and abandoning
their print job! :)