Dan Ness, Principal Analyst, MetaFacts, August 23, 2023
Summary
Most Americans use a printer at home, school, or in a workplace. However, market penetration has sagged over the last five years, and the divide between printer users and non-users has widened.
This TUPdate looks at the long-term trend of printer usage among each generation of Americans. It addresses the question of whether people born around the same time and having grown up with certain technology are increasing or decreasing their printer usage more or less than other generations. The analysis is based on thirteen years of TUP user surveys (TUP 2011 through 2023) as each successive generation grows, evolves, and chooses the technology products and services they use.
The next generation will not save printers
Not all Americans behave the same. Many pundits espouse that each next-younger generation will be the savior, the ones to quickly adopt any newest technology products and services. However, history has not borne this out, especially concerning printer usage.
Although Gen Z came out of the gate strongly upon reaching adulthood, with 82% using a printer upon reaching maturity, their penetration rate only slowly climbed until 2018. TUP uses the widely accepted definition of Generation Z as adults aged 18 or higher who were born in 1997 or later. As this younger generation met the pandemic and recession, many encountered roadblocks in the workplace and in schooling. Along with those blocks came reduced printer usage.
Millennials, well, are being millennials. Their printer usage crested in 2015 at 87% and has slid steadily ever since. At only one brief point since 2011 has this group of Americans used a printer as often as the next-older generation – Gen X. Millennials have experienced many technological advances in their lifetimes and found ways to leverage what they know in newer ways.
In fact, in only a very few cases has a younger generation used a printer more than their older counterparts.
Usage guidelines: This document may be freely shared within and outside your organization in its entirety and unaltered. It may not be used in a generative AI system without express written permission and licensing. To share or quote excerpts, please contact MetaFacts.
Dan Ness, Principal Analyst, MetaFacts, March 17, 2023
Summary
Most Americans use a printer at home, school, or in a workplace. However, market penetration has sagged over the last five years, and the divide between printer users and non-users has widened.
This TUPdate looks at the long-term trend of printer usage among each generation of Americans. It addresses the question of whether people born around the same time and having grown up with certain technology are increasing or decreasing their printer usage more or less than other generations. The analysis is based on twelve years of TUP user surveys (TUP 2011 through 2022) as each successive generation grows, evolves, and chooses the technology products and services that they use.
The next generation will not save printers
Not all Americans behave the same. Many pundits espouse that each next-younger generation will be the savior, the ones to quickly adopt any newest technology products and services. However, history has not borne this out, especially concerning printer usage.
Although Gen Z came out of the gate strongly upon reaching adulthood, with 82% using a printer upon reaching maturity, their penetration rate only slowly climbed until 2018. TUP uses the widely accepted definition of Generation Z as adults aged 18 or higher who were born in 1997 or later. As this younger generation met the pandemic and recession, many encountered roadblocks in the workplace and in schooling. Along with those blocks came reduced printer usage.
Millennials, well, are being millennials. Their printer usage crested in 2015 at 87% and has slid steadily ever since. At only one brief point since 2011 has this group of Americans used a printer as often as the next-older generation – Gen X. Millennials have experienced many technological advances in their lifetimes and found ways to leverage what they know in newer ways.
In fact, in only a very few cases has a younger generation used a printer more than their older counterparts.
Usage guidelines: This document may be freely shared within and outside your organization in its entirety and unaltered. It may not be used in a generative AI system without express written permission and licensing. To share or quote excerpts, please contact MetaFacts.
Dan Ness, Principal Analyst, MetaFacts, September 1, 2021
Purchase plans – a key indicator
Online Americans have some of the most substantial purchase plans we have seen for years. Over 7,600 American respondents reported their detailed technology purchase plans, of which almost 5,000 respondents have any plans to buy PCs, smartphones, tablets, printers, or wearables. MetaFacts gathered these results between July 29 and August 19, 2021. Note: the final TUP/Technology User Profile 2021 results are based on 13,918 respondents in the US, UK, Germany, Japan, and China.
Purchase plans for PCs are nearly equal to smartphone purchase plans and are up firmly from one year ago
47% of online Americans plan to purchase a smartphone in the coming 12 months, and the rate is similar (45% for PC purchase plans
By comparison, in TUP 2020, 41% of Americans planned to purchase a smartphone, and 36% planned to buy a PC
Desktop plans are effectively equal for tower desktops as well as all-in-one designs, although both are lagging behind gaming desktops
Laptop purchase plans slightly lead desktop plans, as buyers prefer mobile PCs (even if it means only moving the PC around their house)
Wi-Fi + Cellular laptops are now on par with plans for non-Cellular laptops
Plans for tablets are much stronger than historical levels as users continue to experiment with working from home
Almost one-third (30%) of online Americans currently have tablet purchase plans
One year ago, only 23% of online Americans planned to buy a tablet in the coming 12 months
Plans for iPads are almost double the rate for Android tablets
Plans for iPhones are roughly 50% higher than the rate for Android smartphones
Plans for Apple Watches are almost double the rate for smartwatches for Android users
Planners of note
Americans working from home have stronger purchase plans than those not working from home. Even those who only occasionally work from home have stronger than average plans.
Americans planning to purchase a tablet or wearables (such as Apple Watch) have a higher than average share already using some type of Apple product (iPhone, iPad, Mac) as their primary or secondary connected device.
Wearable purchase plans are strongest among Americans already using some type of Wearable – Apple Watch, Android Wear or other smartwatch.
Looking ahead
Purchase intentions are a leading indicator of consumer interest. However, consumers are known to be fickle and current economic conditions are still in flux.
Other resources
Clients interested in drilling down into current results or comparing to prior waves can refer to the rows “810 Plans”. These results are included in the following table sets:
By Age Group, by Age Generations, By Country, By Employment/Age, By Employer Size, by Household Size, by Employer Industry, by Children Present, and by Work from Home Status
Customized tables are analysis are available by inquiry.
About MetaFAQs
MetaFAQs are answers to frequently asked questions about technology users. The research results showcase the TUP/Technology User Profile study, MetaFacts’ survey of a representative sample of online adults profiling the full market’s use of technology products and services. The current wave of TUP is TUP/Technology User Profile 2021, which is TUP’s 39th annual.
Current subscribers may use the comprehensive TUP datasets to obtain even more results or tailor these results to fit their chosen segments, services, or products. As subscribers choose, they may use the TUP inquiry service, online interactive tools, or analysis previously published by MetaFacts.
On request, interested research professionals can receive complimentary updates through our periodic newsletter. These include MetaFAQs – brief answers to frequently asked questions about technology users – or TUPdates – analysis of current and essential technology industry topics. To subscribe, contact MetaFacts.
LENSES: Devices, PCs, Tablets, Mobile Phones, User Profile
Usage guidelines: This document may be freely shared within and outside your organization in its entirety and unaltered. It may not be used in a generative AI system without express written permission and licensing. To share or quote excerpts, please contact MetaFacts.
Dan Ness, Principal Analyst, MetaFacts, October 20, 2020
Even while taking pictures is a regular part of most American’s lives as an everyday activity with their smartphone, printing them on a home printer is a declining trend. This MetaFAQs reports on the regular use of home printers to print photos and the use of smartphones to take pictures from 2016 through 2020.
Usage guidelines: This document may be freely shared within and outside your organization in its entirety and unaltered. It may not be used in a generative AI system without express written permission and licensing. To share or quote excerpts, please contact MetaFacts.
Dan Ness, Principal Analyst, MetaFacts, October 16, 2020
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, home printers have been increasingly used for work. This growth is primarily among American adults that are neither the youngest nor the oldest. This MetaFAQs reports on the use of home printers for personal activities as well as work-related activities by age group.
Usage guidelines: This document may be freely shared within and outside your organization in its entirety and unaltered. It may not be used in a generative AI system without express written permission and licensing. To share or quote excerpts, please contact MetaFacts.
Dan Ness, Principal Analyst, MetaFacts, October 9, 2020
It’s not enough for online Americans to have a home printer. It’s important to know how much they’re using what they have. This MetaFAQs reports on the trend in average number of pages being printed with home printers among online Americans from 2015 through 2020.
Usage guidelines: This document may be freely shared within and outside your organization in its entirety and unaltered. It may not be used in a generative AI system without express written permission and licensing. To share or quote excerpts, please contact MetaFacts.
Dan Ness, Principal Analyst, MetaFacts, October 5, 2020
Home printers have been been the backbone of the home computing experience. As Americans spend more time online and communicate directly online, their use of home printers has shifted. This has in turn affected the share of adults using a home PC. This MetaFAQs looks at the trend in home printer penetration from 2015 through 2020.
Usage guidelines: This document may be freely shared within and outside your organization in its entirety and unaltered. It may not be used in a generative AI system without express written permission and licensing. To share or quote excerpts, please contact MetaFacts.
TUP/Technology User Profile 2020 spans a broad range of technology products and services, about the full range of users, including their activities, and all unified by a central, integrated dataset. The comprehensive research results can be viewed through a number of topical lenses, and from there, can be further customized or drilled down into.
Usage guidelines: This document may be freely shared within and outside your organization in its entirety and unaltered. It may not be used in a generative AI system without express written permission and licensing. To share or quote excerpts, please contact MetaFacts.
Inertia simultaneously saves and disrupts technological transformation. Scanners and printers with integrated scanners have been at the heart of the paper to digital change. So much that was paper is now electronic. The “paperless office” has been a hyped cliché for decades, and yet is truer with each passing year. Although electronic signatures have been legal for over 20 years in most countries, and digital copies are increasingly acceptable in many cases, the migration from paper to electronic lumbers along gradually. Consumers and businesses alike continue to need to convert hardcopy documents and images into electronic form.
Standalone Scanners Subsiding
Scanning is still alive, although standalone scanners are only being used by a relative few.
The regular use of a standalone scanner has sagged across a range of countries, as we found in research results from the MetaFacts TUP/Technology User Profile survey. Our TUP 2019 survey of 11,625 respondents in the US, Germany, and China show that only a small percent of online adults use a standalone scanner.
There are a range of standalone scanners available, as distinct from the scanners included in MFP (Multi-Function Printers). Standalone scanners with ADFs (automatic document feeders) are well-suited to converting large batches of documents into a digital form, either for archiving or for wider use in a new electronic form. Flatbed scanners are useful for incidental scanning. Specialized scanners, such as business card scanners, are also useful for specific tasks. All these types of standalone scanners are included within these numbers, reflecting their niche use.
Standalone neither young nor old
Younger generations, many referred to as digital natives, have not embraced standalone scanners. Neither are older adults the major users of paper scanners. The share of age 18-24 and 25-34 are effectively the same as among age 55-64 and 65 and older.
What the young do
Younger Americans – especially age 25-34 – have a unique scanning profile. As compared to any other age group, they are above average in using standalone scanners to scan personal documents, personal photographs, work documents, and work photographs. Americans age 55+ stand out in being well above average in scanning personal documents. These older are adults are also well below average in scanning personal photographs and work documents or photographs.
Difference of One or Many among Young and Old
Older Americans that use standalone scanners use flatbed one-document-at-a-time scanners at a much higher rate than younger Americans. While 78% of American scanner users age 65+ use a flatbed scanner, only 26% of adults age 18-24 do so. Instead, a higher share of younger adults use a multi-document scanner, with 61% of standalone scanners age 18-24 using one and 54% of age 25-34. Neither younger nor older Americans are primarily using a portable/business card scanner. Among these least-used devices, there’s a slightly younger skew.
More ways than one
Many online adults use computer printers for scanning, choosing either those with single-sheet platens or automatic document feeders (ADF).
Use of printers for scanning is more widespread than use of standalone scanners. Roughly ten times as many adults regularly use their primary printer for scanning as use a standalone printer. The percent of online adults in the US is 36%, 35% in China, and 46% in Germany. These rates are down somewhat from 2015 through 2019 in the many countries we surveyed.
Printer scanning for elders
When using a computer printer to scan, a much higher share of scanning is among older than younger Americans. Half (50%) of online Americans age 65 and higher use their primary printer to scan photos or documents. Among online Americans age 54 and younger, only 35% or fewer regularly use a printer to scan.
One at a time
Over three-fourths (78%) of Americans who scan using a printer only scan one document at a time. Almost half of that number, 37%, only scan multiple items using an automated document feeder. Another half of that number, 16%, regularly do both.
Looking ahead
The silent substitute competition for scanners is near at hand – smartphones. Although arguably smartphones don’t handle the highest demands for scanning, they’re more than adequate for many purposes. Archiving large batches of documents or photographs will continue to be a job for high-end standalone scanners. To take a quick scan of a document, though, to share with others, is well within the capability of nearly every smartphone, and that’s even before the use of specialized scanning or deskewing apps. Add smartphone apps like Microsoft Lens, CamScanner, or the many others that include OCR (optical character recognition) and most needs are covered well enough.
Yet another substitute for scanning is also silent – paperless statements. The majority of banks, brokerages, creditors, utilities, and other suppliers continue to encourage their customers to move from paper to electronic statements. Also, tax and other governmental authorities are increasingly digital, both sending and receiving documents electronically. This reduces the demand for customers to scan paper documents that they can simply download and send to whoever needs a copy.
These trends don’t mean that scanning will completely go away. In fact, most of the decline has already happened for scanner use and scanning with printers. These devices and activities have dropped to the realm of being a niche and are likely to remain so.
About TUPdates
TUPdates feature analysis of current or essential technology topics. The research results showcase the TUP/Technology User Profile study, MetaFacts’ survey of a representative sample of online adults profiling the full market’s use of technology products and services. The current wave of TUP is TUP/Technology User Profile 2020, which is TUP’s 38th annual. TUPdates may also include results from previous waves of TUP.
Current subscribers may use the comprehensive TUP datasets to obtain even more results or tailor these results to fit their chosen segments, services, or products. As subscribers choose, they may use the TUP inquiry service, online interactive tools, or analysis previously published by MetaFacts.
On request, interested research professionals can receive complimentary updates through our periodic newsletter. These include MetaFAQs – brief answers to frequently asked questions about technology users – or TUPdates – analysis of current and essential technology industry topics. To subscribe, contact MetaFacts.
Usage guidelines: This document may be freely shared within and outside your organization in its entirety and unaltered. It may not be used in a generative AI system without express written permission and licensing. To share or quote excerpts, please contact MetaFacts.
Dan Ness, Principal Analyst, MetaFacts, November 7, 2019
Overview
Printing at home has changed in recent years. Printer manufacturers continue to innovate in order to compete and encourage broad active printer use.
This TUPdate looks at the major trends in home printing in the US, and examines how users have changed in both what they print and their volume of printing. Also, it examines printing trends with respect to the broadened use of mobile devices. Further, it looks into whether younger adults print more or less than older ones, and whether presence of children makes a difference.
The source for this analysis is MetaFacts TUP/Technology User Profile, with results from waves 2015 through 2019, all based on surveys of from 7,326 to 8,060 online adults in the US.
Home printer penetration
The majority of online adults in the US use a home printer, although market penetration has dropped over the last two years.
In 2019, 68% of online adults in the US actively use a home printer. This is effectively the same level as in 2018 – 67%. However, this share had been a stable 73% between 2015 to 2017.
The decline has been driven by substitutes, primarily increased use mobile devices
Home printer page volume has declined
While the penetration of home printers has dropped slowly then stabilized, the number of pages being printed has dropped faster.
The average number of pages printed per month has dropped from 38.6 per month in 2015 to 31.8 in 2019, a reduction of nearly 20%.
Mobile substitutes for printing
One of the biggest contributors to the decline in printing – the mass move to mobile platforms. Americans are increasingly using their smartphones to find their way instead of printing maps or directions. That change is happening surely yet slowly.
It may surprise many digital natives that as many as 43.7 million Americans still occasionally print maps/directions.
Meanwhile, photo printing, once the darling of home printing, has also declined substantially. In 2019, 34.2 million adults print photos with their home printers, as steep decline since 2016 levels of 48.1 million Americans. Sharing photos in person on their mobile device or over social networks has risen in popularity.
Home printing has also subsided for customarily work-related documents such as reports and presentations. This is due in part to employers increasingly moving their communications to electronic formats.
One surprise – printing photos from tablets has decreased, even while tablet use has steadily increased. Also, mobile users are becoming more comfortable with printing directly from their smartphone or tablet. The decline is due in large part to the ongoing decline in printing photos at all, regardless of device.
Shifts in major home printer activities
The top home printer activity is coupons, currently an activity of 65.6 million US adults. This is slightly lower than several years ago, in 2016, where this activity was occasionally done by 68.8 million Americans.
Meanwhile printing tickets has quickly risen from being done by 38.6 million adults in 2016 to 52.4 in 52.4 in 2019.
Home printing and presence of children
One group that historically prints more than average are adults with children in the household. Whether it’s printing homework, photos, or greeting cards, these households are simply busier with their technology.
Households with children continue to print more than those without, although this rate has dropped recently. Between 2017 and 2019, the average number of pages printed by adults with children has dropped from more than 50 pages per month to just over 40.
Are younger digital natives responsible for less printing?
No. The youngest adults (18-24) are printing as much as ever, and currently more than most older adults.
The largest drop in print volume is among adults age 25 to 44.
How are printer manufacturers innovating?
Convenience is key. Ink subscription services make it easier for home printer users to keep their printers ready. Wireless connections facilitate printing from PCs as well as smartphones and tablets. Touch screens and preview screens give users more control. Voice assistants allow for hands-off capabilities.
Expanded use: Multi-function printers include scanning capabilities
Ink subscription plans
Overall, 19% of online adults in the US subscribe to an ink replacement plan for their home printer.
Not all home printers are used equally
Wireless connections dominate active use. Wi-Fi connections allow printing from PCs throughout a home as well as those nearby the printer.
Printing from a smartphone are tablet are used, although at a much lower rate than penetration of those devices. Bluetooth printing is hardly used.
Scanning is widespread.
Remote printing is very low.
Voice assistant use is almost nonexistent.
Active features by brand
Epson stands out for having the most unique set of features actively used, each being used more often than by the users of other home printer brands.
Home printer volume by brand
What’s ahead for home printers?
Home printers will continue to have a place in US homes for many years, even as their activity levels may shrink. The top current printing activities, coupons and tickets, will be replaced slowly over time as consumers become more comfortable with having secure documents on their smartphones or tablets.
Personal records and incidental web pages will likely linger, as consumers continue to value having hard copy archival copies for safekeeping. Even though it might be argued that electronic cloud storage is more secure, the majority of users are only slowly understanding that.
Home printers will be retained and renewed, if only for the convenience of having one around just in case it is needed.
About TUPdates
TUPdates feature analysis of current or essential technology topics. The research results showcase the TUP/Technology User Profile study, MetaFacts’ survey of a representative sample of online adults profiling the full market’s use of technology products and services. The current wave of TUP is TUP/Technology User Profile 2020, which is TUP’s 38th annual. TUPdates may also include results from previous waves of TUP.
Current subscribers may use the comprehensive TUP datasets to obtain even more results or tailor these results to fit their chosen segments, services, or products. As subscribers choose, they may use the TUP inquiry service, online interactive tools, or analysis previously published by MetaFacts.
On request, interested research professionals can receive complimentary updates through our periodic newsletter. These include MetaFAQs – brief answers to frequently asked questions about technology users – or TUPdates – analysis of current and essential technology industry topics. To subscribe, contact MetaFacts.
Usage guidelines: This document may be freely shared within and outside your organization in its entirety and unaltered. It may not be used in a generative AI system without express written permission and licensing. To share or quote excerpts, please contact MetaFacts.