So we are in the market for newer thermal printers. Up until this point we have ran off the GK420d from Zebra and have been able to get new ones at a reasonable price. Now however I only seem to be able to get them used at a slightly inflated price.
What are you using as your thermal printer of choice?
Would prefer the printer to be able to hand 4-inch wide media and be direct transfer. Epicor connectivity out of the box or with supplementary drivers are a must!
who is your vendor? Have you tried barcodes inc?
Stick with Zebra. Upgrade to the ZD600 or ZD400 series.
We have an Arkscan 2054A that’s working great for us since May of last year. We have it printing on these water proof labels.
We don’t have a vendor at the moment. We just buy them off Amazon / eBay as needed.
Ill definitely give barcodes a look-up!
@Evan_Purdy - Can you give us any long-term stats on those? Do they have problems, fail much, work in a dusty environment? Curious because they are a good price and look like Zebra ZD/GD clones.
I’ve only had the one since May 2022, so I don’t know that I will be able to give any good data. We haven’t had a single issue so far. They do appear to be Zebra clones, they even advertise that Zebra drivers will work with them.
Edit: If you have a lot of printers and go through em, its worth just getting one to try. I was drawn to it as they aren’t as proprietary as some devices. It replaced a DYMO that broke. We were going to replace with a new DYMO but it was very expensive and required proprietary label material.
@Evan_Purdy Thanks for that. We have an environment that is kind of harsh/dusty, so thermal head MTBF is a big deal for us. But at that price, they are more disposable than repairable!
Our environment isn’t great, a lot of dust, and at least half of that dust its metal… It was terrible before but we’ve put in a lot more air handlers and paved some dirt areas so no more dust devils at least.
FedEx / UPS will supply you a printer for shipping purposes. Quickship will integrate.
We use little Dymo printers for small labels, but enter those manually.
Occasionally we use Avery labels and print from a custom report.