When Technology advances, a wake of outdated products are often left behind. This, now more than ever, is seen in many different industries, some totally destroyed by new and exciting tech.

One of the greatest examples I can think of right now is that of Photo Printing and consumer level film. The photo industry was once a huge one, in which owning a Polaroid camera or going to the local Kodak store to get your holiday pics processed was common among most. But with the arrival of the digital camera much of the above became redundant. People could now take as many pictures as they like and save every single one on to a disk or computer. Once the likes of camera phones and the instant sharing of photos on social networks arrived, that was pretty much it.

The latest example of this, while not quite as extreme, is the way technology is affecting the printing industry. People are just not printing as much as they used to. HP themselves have even noticed the drop, yet still insist that "printing is not going away".

So what is the cause of this drop in printer and ink sales? Well there are a multitude of explanations that could explain this decrease...

As mentioned above, Social Media has had a huge impact in consumer Photo Printing, meaning that a lot of those holiday and family photos that were being printed at home are now simply being uploaded to Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, Facebook or one of the many other sites in the sea of social networks. While it's still nice to have physical photos, most choose to simply share them with their friends digitally one way or another.

It's not just social media either. Handheld devices such as smart phones, tablet computers, e-readers and even GPS devices have created quite a dent in the need to print both at home and in the office. There's not much need to print notes off for a meeting when you can have a much better and probably more interactive version on your iPad. There's no need to print off a voucher, boarding pass, cinema ticket or confirmation of any type when you can access most of these from your phone with much more ease. There's no need to print out a map of a driving route to a new location when you can have the likes of Patrick Stewart in digital form direct you verbally to wherever you need to go.

Those are just a few of the ways this new age of technology have and will continue to impact the printing world. Whether or not it will destroy it all together is something I do not know, but I imagine that some technology (possibly something like this) will come along in the not so distant future and totally get rid of the need of printing.