H.P. Tries to Create Printers That Love the Web

Damon Darlin
The New York Times
Monday, April 9th, 2007
The Story
The Summary: HP sees a rising trend to a paperless society, so their trying to get people to print more.

I'm not a huge environmentalist... I like to recycle, and I try my best to shut off a light before I leave a room (doesn't always happen, but I TRY) I also do things like drive a car frequently (most of the time by myself) and drink water from pre-packaged bottles (they're convienent!)

But I'm not a big fan of randomly printing stuff out, just for the sake of randomly printing stuff out. I don't like to kill trees! Why would I want to print out a website? With CRT monitors dying out for easier to read LCD monitors, it's easy to read large blocks of text for long periods of time with out printing them out.

Granted, the use of recycled paper is on the rise, but still. When email first came out and the home computer became as common as telephones there was all this buzz of a paperless society. "We won't need paper anymore! We won't need real mail, we'll be able to correspond by email!" But printing increased.

And now, as HP foresees the use of printers going down, they're trying to increase printing of websites and blogs. (if you're reading this, please DO NOT print it out!!!)

I'm not comfortable with the idea of increased consumption. Don't we use enough in this country? Almost everything is powered by finite resources. We don't need big corporations pushing us to use more. I own a printer, but I don't use it. I haven't had it hooked up to my computer for more than a year. If I need to print something out, I do it at school.

It annoys me when we can't just email our professors assignments. Why should we print out a copy?

Grrrr... DO NOT WASTE