Multifunction Printers Bridge the Digital Divide
by Mark Ontkush, Boston, Massachusetts, USA 
on 11.12.07
Didja ever wonder why the paperless office never happened? It's no secret; the proverbial 'we' introduced a second data stream into the equation, the digital stream. So now we need to convert paper faxes into emails, emails into text, scans into images... you get the picture (yes, it's a pun.). Read The Myth of the Paperless Office to put the skin on the bones.
Recently, multifunction printers (MFP) have been made available to provide one stop shopping for all these woes. These amazing devices can print, scan, copy, fax, email, and save files to your network, and act as an information hub to bridge the gap between your paper data and your digital data. There are dozens available; which ones are green? Unlike the typical green printer, the choice is not so simple.
First, look for a machine that does everything you need; if you do a lot of faxing you will want to spring for the fax-to-email functionality that some of these devices have, even though it will cost you more; the same goes for color printing. Neaty green features include sleep mode (turns itself off), a black only print mode (much cheaper than color), using solid stick ink, skipping blank pages, and recycling of ink cartridges. The Xerox Phaser Line is a good choice for these reasons; it doesn't have all these features but it does have a lot of them. More high end, but with better graphics and speed, is the Epson AcuLaser line which is also a good bet. :: Article Friendly :: Macworld
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Faxing? That is SO 80's.
The reason the paperless office never "happened" can be summarized in one sentence, no need for an entire book printed on paper:
It's hard to teach an old fart new tricks.
The information in an electronic document is the same in the printed one. It's just wasteful and expensive to print it out. The paperless office is here, I'm sitting in one right now. Anyone using a fax machine might as well use smoke signals or morse code. Probably the same people still subscribing to newspapers. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with being scared of technology, but if you want to lessen the amount of resouces you consume (and buy), put a little effort into joining the 21st century.
Just like all of the other treehugger activities, you have to actually put effort into transitioning from the old to the new ways. If you are using a bunch of paper, you're not trying. Some people throw away recyclable materials, some people print email. It's the same lack of effort and concern behind both.
Convenience is probably the main reason that the paperless office hasn't happened. It's much more convenient to be able to take the paper wherever you want and actually write on it than to be locked into the somewhat limited computer. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but I believe that that is one of the reasons it never arrived.
As for newspapers, anonymous, there is a reason they're sticking around. They are, once again, convenient, but also much more trustworthy than information found on the internet, and people enjoy the format of the newspaper.
Contracts. Contracts must be signed and most people want them signed on paper. A fax copy is enough to start a business deal but two copies in hand is required to complete most of them. In my office Faxed contracts and shipping documents are the only things printed.
Why go buy a machine that converts your faxes into e-mails - why not just go for an efax service so they show up in your e-mail without the hardware? (That is, if you have to use fax at all. It truly is an antiquated and wasteful protocol.)
"It's hard to teach an old fart new tricks."
Not entirely. I'm far from an old fart and I love technology, but there are simply some things that paper is good at. I generally print out pages of code if I have to debug or refactor something nasty. If you have to annotate a document it's usually easier to do it on paper, especially since the interface is pretty much universal and you can do it just about anywhere.
But then you type those annotations into a computer and then send it to someone else to review who will print it out and write their own annotations.
The biggest difference is that now printing is really easy. If we had to retype things on typewriters, people would take care with original copies. They'd use standardized annotations and would use different colored pens. Then they'd have their secretary type up a final copy to send out.
I think that once there is a universal document reader that is capable of accepting notations and has almost universal battery life, we'll see less paper use.
Many of the Document Management application snow have a "print to" function so you can print into a repository. I have placed this technology in several companies, and eliminated the paper trail all together. Some of my articles at www.scanguru.com