Eltron/Zebra P420i Thermal Printers

[reuber1]

Yes, I am starting a thread in the printing/pre-press forums. Take a picture, or a screen shot.

Now, I've been using these for about two weeks (two Eltron P420 and a Zebra P420i...I think Eltron was bought out by Zebra and we got the P420i after the buy out, so they're all essentially the same thing) to print gift cards for our client stores. Now, is it just me, or do these things always print in lousy quality? I thought 90% of the problem with some of the cards I was printing was because some of the images were straight up JPGs with logos from their websites; that's what they want, and most are satisfied with what they get. So, I decided to do a quick mockup in Illy, save it as a TIFF (because of the program we use to print the gift cards, "Card Five", only allows so many file types) at 300 dpi, and it still prints like crap.

By "crap" I mean there are LOTS of jaggiees on any curves. Is this common for thermal printers to print like this?

[Xaosii]

Is it a thermal printer or a thermal transfer printer? The transfer printer typically needs a roll of "toner" that heads up the printer head and stamps the ink side of the roll down the paper. A thermal printer needs a special kind of paper that the printer heats up the paper and due to the properties of the paper, the heat turns it black.

If its a thermal transfer printer, the quality tends to be better, and so does the resolution, but offers no grayscale support. It either puts down toner at full intendity or it doesn't. With that in mind don't make anything with gradients and probably nothing too curvy as it supports no anti-aliasing needed to get a sharp curve. Stick with somewhat boxy designs. It was never meant for heavy graphics since its mostly just used for bar codes and small labels that usually don't have any kind of graphics.

If its a regular thermal printer, the resolution tends to be very low and the print quality varies alot per sheet being printed. The more it prints, the messier it usually gets (that or it fades) which means making big designs won't look good unless its a very short run. Thermal printers do, however, have some support for gray scale, but typically only with a very high dot gain (that you'll probably have to manually create) or by faking it by creating thinning lines of black to give the illusion of a gradience. You'll need to be creative in order to pull off most kinds of effects.

Be warned, with the regular thermal printers, due to the characteristics of the paper, the label tends to turn gray or a very dull yellow when exposed to the sun, which tends to happen while the packaged it being shipped! After about a week of regular sun exposure, your design will probably end up looking like a big blotchy, murky, black smeer. Most of your hard work will get destroyed!

In short: Yes, its normal for your designs to look like total crap through almost any kind of thermal printer. It was never really intended to go beyond bar code labels.

[reuber1]

Sweet! An answer! :p

Yeah, it's regular. The designs are for the most part horrendous to begin with (I am not doing them...yet), but I know certain elements that look decent still print lousy. The printer prints a test card perfectly though!

Oh well, thanks for the input. :cool:

[Xaosii]

Sweet! An answer! :p

Yeah, it's regular. The designs are for the most part horrendous to begin with (I am not doing them...yet), but I know certain elements that look decent still print lousy. The printer prints a test card perfectly though!

Oh well, thanks for the input. :cool:

A test print you made or a test print from the drivers?

A lot of thermal printers offer a speed rating option on the drivers, which significantly improves print quality at an equally drastic decrease in speed. The test print may have been done at the slowest speed possible, which makes things look nice, but impractical if you want to print, say, 1,000 labels in about an hour. It'll probably go slower than that (at least with the thermal printers i've worked with) - maybe at the rate of a 3 x 4 label per 4 or 5 seconds.

If you still want quality check a bit more thoroughly in the drivers for some kind of speed or rate, and not just the DPI.

[reuber1]

Test print from the drivers. I'll have to look into it further. I've never touched a thermal printer in my life.