Portable Thermal Printer
Selecting The Right Portable Thermal Printer
Welcome to our website. On this website you will be able to find suppliers of all types of commercial and industrial portable thermal printers in the various prices and sizes. Here you will find great deal, low cost thermal printers for your growing business. With a variety of choices and manufacturers available, being able to select the right printer is the keys to minimize your downtime and reduce your operational running cost. We will look at a variety of thermal printers available in the market today. What are some of the keys differences between various manufactures around the world. What they can do, how they operate and what are some of the limitations of these printers. After reading this, you will gain sufficient knowledge to help you to select the appropriate thermal printer to meet your requirements.
Portable or mobile thermal printers produced by many manufacturers today use direct thermal technology. The design of a direct thermal transfer mechanism is generally simpler and have less moving parts and due to the fact they do not use ink or ribbon and because of their simple design, they tend to be more durable and easy to use and often cost less to operate. Direct transfer printer uses only a special heat sensitive paper to produce images. A heating coated thermo chromic paper or commonly known as thermal paper. During the printing process, the paper travels over the heated print head at a selected speed. The coated paper area where the head is turns black producing the desired printed graphic image.
The world leader in thermal printing technology is Zebra. Zebra have been in the printing business for more than 30 years and has sold several millions printers to customers worldwide. Their primary business is to design and manufacture printing devices that print variable information on demand. Zebra manufactures direct thermal and thermal transfer label and receipt printers. They also produce and supplies labels, ribbons and other accessories. Zebra is a trusted brand but they can be more costly especially in the high end ranges. Desktop and mobile Printers - Zebra desktop printers are compact and easy to operate. They are best suited to companies requiring low volume printed labels. Typical applications are patient ID wristbands, price tags and packaging labels. Zebra 2828 printer is very popular has a print with up to 2.2 inches, 203 dpi and a print speed of 4 inch per second. Zebra P4T mobile printer can print either direct thermal or thermal transfer mode. It can print tags up to 4 inch wide. Good for printing bar code labels and receipts and is very useful for warehouse or filed work.
Most portable thermal printers are compact with many features which can be used in a large variety of job environments ranging from door to door sales through small and mid-sized catering establishments, Car rentals, parking lots, field services to on-board sales on land, sea and air. IrDA or Bluetooth communication with a PDA or similar device is useful for business activities at the point of sale or service. Easily worn on the belt it is a highly efficient device for printing plain text and graphic receipts on demand plus logos, bar codes and other graphic elements.
For the Bluetooth communication, it is necessary to choose the correct function and set the DIP switches for Bluetooth. As built-in Bluetooth module supports Serial Port Profile, host machine needs to communicate with the printer based on serial port profile. You can refer to the software manual of the host machine for the details. When the printer connects through the Bluetooth interface, the host machine may require a pin code depending on the security level. The last 4 characters of the Bluetooth address that prints on the printer self test are the pin code that should be entered in to the host machine.
Be sure to use specified thermal paper rolls. Make sure that the paper is correctly placed. If print paper is tilted in one direction or another and does not come out straight from under the cover, Skewed setting may result in paper jamming and printing quality will be affected. Print density may change with the kind of print paper. Print density is adjusted by the Print Density Set command in Command Reference. Thermal paper is not resistant to discoloration, deterioration in quality and thin printing. Do not let printed thermal paper exposed to light for a long time. Avoid exposure to high temperature, humidity, liquid or sunlight. Using print paper with a thickness outside the recommended range may cause improper print quality.
