Eventually we’re not going to need traditional printers at home, but I’ve talked about some of the reasons why we still need them at the moment.

New technologies come and go on a daily basis. We think we can’t live without something, but within days it’s taken out of our lives and we don’t even realize it’s gone. I think this is what is going to happen with the traditional printer. Maybe not office printers, but definitely the ones we keep in our homes. Luckily we still need them at the moment and I’m going to look at a few reasons why they won’t be going anywhere just yet.

Lovely family photos

Can you imagine if we were transported back to a time where we didn’t have digital cameras? Instead of taking thousands of photos we would be limited by the number of 35mm cartridges we could afford. Now that you can take all those photos of your family you don’t want to keep all of them trapped on the computer forever. If you have a printer you can easily print them out. In the future photograph-specific printers will take over, but for now your regular printer still comes in handy.

Printing boarding passes

Flights are very inexpensive these days and it means we can jump on a plane a lot more often compared to previous years. We’re also very impatient in general, but thanks to technology we don’t need to spend time waiting around at the airport to check-in if we don’t have a suitcase. You can just do everything from the comfort of your home before you leave for the airport, but at the end of the day you still need a printer to print out your boarding pass otherwise you won’t be getting on the plane.

Working from home

If you work from home there is a good chance you’ll still need a printer for some things. Some customers still don’t know how to use email so you’ll need to print out letters to send off. If you send physical products to people on a daily basis you will need to print out shipping labels. Once you get to the stage where you’re sending out multiple parcels per day you might need a dedicated shipping label printer, but just like with printing photos an ordinary printer will work at the moment.

Reading ebooks offline

If you have a Kindle you can read almost any ebook in the world, but there are still come companies who prefer to sell PDF versions of their ebooks. This is usually because they can charge a much higher price for them, but for you it means you’re stuck reading them on the computer. This isn’t ideal for some people because they might get sore eyes staring at a screen for too long, so you can use a printer to print it out so you can read the book at your leisure when you’re not sitting at your desk.

Physical reminders

I don’t think most people appreciate how unsafe computers actually are. If you store all your data on the computer it will be safe, but that is only until your hard drive breaks down and you can’t recover anything. The risk of something like this happening is obviously very small, but some people still like to print out physical copies of certain things. Backup hard drives and online storage are also an option, but there is nothing wrong with storing physical backups away somewhere.

They will eventually go

Even newer technology will come out and traditional printers will become obsolete in a home environment. As an example, when we spoke about boarding passes, we didn’t even consider everything will be done through our Smartphones in a few years. How long do you think it will be before you get rid of your one?

Author Bio:

The author of this post, Nancy Baker, is a freelance blogger who is currently writing for Excel Toner, leading providers of ink cartridges. She has a very dynamic personality and she loves to try new things. You can also follow her on Twitter @ Nancy Baker.