Please enjoy the new eco-friendly printers, now arguably less eco-friendly

Raymond Chen

Some years ago, the IT department replaced the printers multifunction devices with new reportedly eco-friendly models. One feature of the new devices is that when you send a job to the printer, it doesn’t print out immediately. Printing doesn’t begin until you go to the device and swipe your badge through the card reader. The theory here is that this cuts down on the number of forgotten or accidental printouts, where you send a job to a printer and forget to pick it up, or you click the Print button by mistake. If a job is not printed within a few days, it is automatically deleted.

The old devices already supported secured printing, where the job doesn’t come out of the printer until you go to the device and release the job. But with this change, secured printing is now mandatory. Of course, this means that even if you weren’t printing something sensitive, you still have to stand there and wait for your document to print instead of having the job already completed and waiting for you.

The new printing system also removes the need for job separator pages. Avoiding banner pages and eliminating forgotten print jobs are touted as the printer’s primary eco-friendly features.

Other functions provided by the devices are photocopying and scanning. With the old devices, you place your document on the glass or in the document hopper, push the Scan button, and the results are emailed to you. With the new devices, you place your document on the glass or in the document hopper, push the Scan button, and the results are emailed to you, plus a confirmation page is printed out.

Really eco-friendly service there, printing out confirmation pages for every scanning job.

The problem was fixed a few weeks later.

Bonus chatter: Our fax machines also print confirmation pages, or at least they did the last time I used one, many years ago.

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