Zebra label printers - your opinions?

[Click2Post.co.uk]

Hi,

We currently have the older Eltron/Zebra DA402 direct thermal label printer, which is still going strong. My only gripe is time it takes between pressing print, and the label coming out. Takes about 8 seconds from pressing print to the label starting to print. The label itself is printed in just 1 second.

The device is connected via parallel. The label is just an address label from MS Access (Report), windows print manager says its 320kb when printing, however even printing a notepad document with one word in it takes just as long.

When I press print, the green light on the Zebra will starting flashing straight away, so I guess the printer is just thinking for those 8 seconds?

Does anybody with the newer LP2844 experience the same problem, or are those quicker?

Thanks.

 

[dizzysolutions]

I experienced the same issue with the 2844. This was remedied by changing some driver setting. From what I can remember, we sped up our older thermal printers by using fonts only available on the printer rather than fonts like Arial etc.

This was some time ago so I'm not sure I can be of much more help, but hopefully this helps.

 

[Merchant UK]

When i had a tuffnells account a year ago they gave me a zebra printer and that was connected via USB, There was always a delay until the label came out?? then it would print it reall quick??

perhaps its a thing with zebra printers, they seem to store it to a memory in full before they print?? Take a look at the properties under printer and there may be a tickbox to tick to print immediately or wait??

 

[H22SolutionsLtd]

The problem here is you are using windows print drivers. I have been printing zebra for years (from access) and use 2 methods. One uses windows printer drivers and the other uses ZPL programming language. ZPL is useful (and prints almost instantly) for barcodes.

Using your current method, your computer is spending alot of time translating your text/pictures etc into a format that the ZPL printer will understand.

Sending ZPL commands, no translation required, instant (virtually) printing.

The code I use sends the ZPL to the IP address of the networked printer. If you are interested drop me a PM and I'll dig the code out for you.