I promised Sue I wouldn’t mention her company name when I wrote this, but I want to show you how neglected a barcode printer can be and still work.  Here are the consequences if you don’t get your barcode printer serviced, keep it clean or look after it!

I went to visit Sue and see how her printer is performing and couldn’t resist taking this photo.

This is a pretty powerful endorsement of just how durable Zebra printers are.

This Zebra S4M is seven years old and never been serviced (and I think it’s probably never been cleaned).  It’s been printing several thousand labels a week, without a problem.

You can see it is coated in a layer of dust inside and out and the printhead was thick with black label and ribbon residue.  The platen roller (if you don’t know what a platen roller is – there’s a picture below) was also cut (never use a knife to get labels out of your printer).

Three reasons why you need a regular barcode printer service

1. It will cost you more to replace the thermal printhead and platen roller.  Both will eventually wear out, but they can last twice as long if they’re looked after properly.
2. Your once beautiful barcode label printer will produce labels that won’t scan if you don’t service your printer.  Labels that can’t be read are a problem because your customers will get angry when they can’t scan them at the checkout.*
3. It’s very stressful.  Your barcode printer will stop working at the worst possible time – just when you need to print 10,000 labels.  You’ll be highly stressed telling your customer that their shipment can’t go out because you can’t print any labels.  You’ll be on the phone asking for an engineer to come out to fix your label printer right away and you won’t be having a good day.  A same day visit (if you can get one) will cost lots of money.

How to Avoid the Cost and Stress of Neglected Label Printers
If it’s been a while since you had your barcode printer serviced or even cleaned – you have a couple of choices – the dependable and the inexpensive options.

Dependable: book an engineer to come out and give your barcode label printer a service.  They will clean and check it and replace any parts that are worn or damaged.  See more here.

Inexpensive: buy some alcohol cleaning wipes (we sell COSHH compliant packs of pre-saturated alcohol cleaning wipes in sealed packets) and get the vacuum cleaner to work.

Vacuum your printer out and clean the printhead and platen roller with the wipes.

Print a test label and check it for quality – there shouldn’t be any white lines appearing in solid blocks of print.  If there are – it indicates your printhead is wearing out.

Take a close look at the platen roller and check it for cuts or wear.  There’s a picture of a platen roller below.   Contact us if you need any help and we’d be happy to advise.  To find out more about our printer support options see our printer support page here.  We have an easy to use guide to cleaning your  barcode label printer – see it here.

*You probably won’t even realise your labels are unreadable until you have ten thousand products in the shops all with bars missing from the barcodes.  Perhaps buying an entry level barcode scanner to test scan every day might be a worthwhile investment?

BarTender is our favourite label design software package.  Not only is the software powerful and reliable, the support we get from the software developers, Seagull Scientific, is quick and knowledgeable. As it’s 30 years old this year, I wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate BarTender’s birthday with some birthday presents.

BarTender first appeared thirty years ago in 1987 as BarTender for DOS (if you remember what DOS was), making it probably the oldest, most stable label design program.  in 1987 Seagull Scientific were making barcode scanners and their barcode design software was a sideline.  In 1993 they launched a Windows version of their label design software and saw, for the first time, that year BarTender sales overtook hardware sales, prompting them to concentrate solely on label design software.

In 1994 Seagull developed windows printer drivers for thermal label printers, and to this day, have been the best alternative (perhaps a better alternative) to the printer manufacturers’ own drivers.

1999 saw Seagull Scientific become an international company, opening a European office – followed by a Taipei office covering Asia Pacific and another in Tokyo.  Another step into the big leagues was establishing a relationship first with Oracle then with SAP – and enabling their top end label edition to work with enterprise level ERP software.

Over the thirty years BarTender has been in development it’s seen 11 major revisions – adding the ability to print onto RFID labels, the addition of ID card printing and a host of incremental improvements for ease of use and stability.  Over the years it’s won numerous awards from various industry groups and associations.

12 Reasons Why You’d Want to Look at BarTender

I’ve chosen just ten features from the hundreds that make BarTender so powerful.  BarTender comes in four editions – Basic, Professional, Automation and Enterprise Automation.  Whilst you can use all of these features with the trial version of the software, not all editions enable all these features.  Talk to us about what you’re wanting to achieve.

1. Connect your databases and spreadsheets directly to your labels – no need to key in product details into your labels.  Simply link your label to the database and select the products you want to print.
2. Use a data entry form to simplify label printing.  Design a form, fill in the fields and print your labels.  Users won’t need to delve into label designs in order to print.
3. Password protect your label designs.  Operators can still print, but they can’t accidentally change your carefully created label formats.
4. Keep track of who’s printed what labels with the detailed usage history.
5. Print directly from your iPhone, iPad or Android device with the BarTender Print Portal app.
6. Automate your label printing – automatically print address labels in response to customer orders arriving on your website.
7. Print from the cloud – use a web portal to print your labels.
8. Print ID cards and RFID embedded labels – use BarTender with your ID Card printer or Radio Frequency ID enabled printer.
9. Design labels quickly and easily – use the alignment tool to align text, or group objects together so you can move them around your label, rotate images, text and barcodes… I could continue.
10. Print onto round, oval or rectangular labels.
11. Reduce the number of label templates your organisation uses – massively. Using BarTender’s Intelligent Templates, large users of labels can organise their templates and reduce the number of templates used.
12. Integrate with ERP systems – BarTender has direct support for corporate ERP systems including SAP, Oracle and IBM WebSphere with BarTender’s easy to use Integration builder.

BarTender Birthday Presents

As with any birthday – let’s talk birthday presents.

We’ve got some useful presents to give away: 8GB USB memory sticks and Power Banks to give your flagging smartphone battery a new lease of life.

We’ll be giving these away to the first four readers from the UK who test for themselves the latest version of BarTender.

All you have to do is download a 30 day trial of BarTender and email me to let me know what you thought to it.  Download the 64 bit and 32 bit versions by clicking here.

Sorry but we’re only giving these gifts to UK based readers.

Not only do we sell barcode printers, labels and scanners we also print tens of thousands of labels each month for our customers. In this short article I want to share with you the hardware and software that we use in our business, and why we use them.

Printing labels.

We have three printers – a Zebra ZM400, a Zebra 170XiII and a Toshiba TEC 572.

Zebra ZM 400

This is our work horse printer. It’s a tough 4 inch wide industrial printer with a metal case and with a capacity for printing tens of thousands of label each day. It’s fast and it’s reliable. What’s special about this particular model is that it has a 300 DPI printhead. That’s certainly good enough quality for the print jobs we do. We’ve not been asked for very high resolution labels so 300 dpi has proved to suit our work. Usual printers are 203 DPI but our ZM400 prints high definition labels which can be used to present product labels and print small barcodes. It’s six years old and has given no sign of stopping.

Zebra 170xii

What is special about this printer is that it’s 6 inches wide. When we have a choice we tend not to use it. Compared to the ZM400 it’s a little fiddly to load ribbons and labels. Once it’s set up it will print for days on end (and from time to time it does). The Zebra Xi series has always been Zebra’s top of the range printers and built for non-stop mission critical printing. We do have one particular job that requires six across labels and this printer is ideal. Six across labels means the output it 50% greater than the ZM400 – if we were using it every day it would pay for itself in no time, because it’s capable of printing more labels every second. In addition to having a very reliable printer, we also need the 170 XiII just in case somebody asks for a very wide label.

With a metal case, this is a very durable printer. On one occasion when we loaned it out to a customer it was dropped. Even though the case was bent slightly the printer has worked ever since. Despite it’s age (it is more than 15 years old) it’s still going strong.

The Toshiba TEC B572

This printer is what’s called a near edge printer. This means that it copes very well with different thicknesses of media. It has a straight through paper path – in other words the labels come off the roll and feed straight under the printhead, through the platen roller and out the front of the printer. That’s useful when you’re printing onto thicker materials such as cardboard tags.

This printer is also a 300 dpi model. It too has a metal case.

It uses different thermal ink ribbons to the two Zebras – near edge ribbons, ribbons with a different composition of wax on it. That’s useful when a customer needs us to test ribbons for them. Not only that, the ribbons are 600m long, compared to Zebra’s 450m so on long jobs there’s less machine watching in case the ribbon runs out. With it’s Near Edge technology, the TEC 572 has “Ribbon Save”. The ribbon stops being pulled through the printer when there’s nothing on the label to print. With traditional printers, if you produce a meter of labels you use a meter of thermal ribbon whether you have text on the label or not. The TEC stops the ribbon moving when there’s no text to print on the labels. We don’t tend to use ribbon save because it slows the printer down – but if saving ribbons was important to us, we would.

This printer is getting on a little also. But with a metal case and available spares, it’ll give us years more printing without a problem.

Label Rewind unit

We couldn’t print longer runs without this handy tool. You switch it on, load an empty cardboard roll onto it, attach the first label out of the printer to it and switch it on. It takes up the tension and waits for more labels to print. As the printer feeds out labels it re-winds them onto the roll. As it’s an external rewind unit, it has a separate power supply and sits on the desk at the front of the printer. This is useful for us, because we can use it with any of the printers we have. Before we bought this unit, we’d sit for hours laboriously rolling labels onto rolls.

Label Design Software

We’ve been using Seagull Scientific’s Bartender label design software for years.  It’s powerful and fairly easy to use.  Because we can find ourselves using it for a wide range of different jobs we need something that’s flexible and powerful.  There’s lots that’s good for example serialisation – you can have number sequences, letter sequences, specify how many numbers/letters the sequence jumps.  Bartender handles GS128 barcodes well.  GS128 barcodes are the large barcodes that you see on pallets and outer case labels.  It’s a barcode that encodes best before dates, lot numbers, pack sizes, manufacturing dates – the list goes on.  Without Bartender managing those “application identifiers”, printing GS128 barcodes would be much more difficult.  Another benefit is the ability to program the software.  One project saw us printing very complex labels.  The label included printing from databases and adding a roll identifier (a label that told the user what range of numbers was printed on the roll).  Bartender also allowed us to print in reverse order so the last label printed was the first label in the sequence.

For advice and ideas for using Bartender, call us on 01359 271 111.

A Label that’s not a Label – it’s a Tag

Most people call them loop lock labels but you might have seen them described as self tie loops, luggage tags, handle ties, self tie tags, wrap ties – even label loops.  They all do the same thing – they’re a tag without adhesive that you loop round on itself and attach to an item.  Technically they’re a label – because they identify something – but without any glue they’re not strictly loop lock labels.

A Tag with a Thousand Uses

These are the tie on tags you see most often on trees and plants, but a more innovative use included one caravan park that tied a different coloured label onto the caravan door handle to indicate which day the caravan needed to be cleaned.  Other uses include turkeys, bread crates and laundry baskets – there must be tens of thousands of possible uses. Once you’ve seen this, you’ll realise how versatile these tags are.  Certainly we’ve supplied them to steel tubing suppliers and abattoirs but most often to plant nurseries or garden centres.

Loop Lock Labels – Choice of Materials

What makes this tag so versatile? One reason is the material they’re made from.  They’re versatile because they can be made from low cost paper, waterproof and durable plastic, tear and scratch proof plastic, heat resistant plastic and tear proof tyvek. What’s more, if you use them in food production, you can get your tags with metal content, so they can be detected by metal detectors (avoiding the PR disaster of having your tags turn up in your customer’s food). Finally, most of these tags are 100% recyclable.

Choice of Printing Onto Your Tags

The other feature that makes them so versatile is how they are printed. Most of our clients use thermal printers because they’re fast, reliable and cheap.  However, many of our garden centre clients print full colour Loop Locks using laser printers and of course there’s still a sizeable number who use the trusty pen. If you need to print full colour loop lock labels – visit our contact page, get in touch and ask about our sheet loop lock label supplies.  If you’re printing thousands, let us print your tags with your logo and message whilst you overprint them with product and price information.

Loop Lock Labels Come in Dozens of Different Shapes and Sizes

Another versatility plus is that these tags come in a huge range of different sizes. In our stock range, choose from eight different colours or have your own logo printed onto the tag. We can even print your labels for you.  Include a perforated tear off section for prices or codes.

Be Warned

Loop Lock Labels come in a fairly small range of standard sizes.  Whilst you’re able to make tags any size you’d like, new tag sizes will cost.  People usually buy plastic tags and cutting dies for plastic materials are more expensive than paper.  Adding perforations and unusual cuts will put up the cost.  Click through to our Loop Lock Label page and see what standard sized tags are available.

If you have a thermal printer, these tags are made to fit any 110mm wide thermal transfer label printer that’s big enough to take a 8 inch roll of labels (i.e. a printer that’s larger than a desktop printer).

Whilst they’re a really easy way to quickly label trees, bushes and shrubs, don’t forget they can be used to tag all sorts of other things. You can use these tags to identify cables, furniture, tools, shelf racking, steel bars, computers – in fact many kinds of assets can be labelled with loop lock labels and tags.

If you need to clearly tag something, Loop lock labels might be the answer.  Call us on 01359 271 111 or email the team at info@expertlabels.co.uk

No, Zebra Inc haven’t developed technology to print babies – but they have launched the new Zebra ZD410 – the baby in their range.  It’s the smallest desktop label printer Zebra make, replacing the long serving Zebra LP2824. Here’s our short review of it:

What’s so special about the Zebra ZD410?

1. It’s small. Did I mention that already? So small that it will fit on any desktop or counter.  Perfect when size really does matter.
2. It’s fast – up to 150mm (six inches) per second.
3. It’s easy to use – it’s direct thermal so there’s no ribbon to change. – Look how wide it opens.
4. It’s got a lot of cabled and wireless connections. Choose from USB, Serial, Wifi, Bluetooth and Ethernet.
5. It’s multilingual (in printer terms) – speaking the printer language of it’s rivals. That means it can directly replace rival brands.
6. You can plug an Zebra supplied keyboard/display unit into the printer, which you can use (after downloading a label format) instead of a computer.
7. It has a movable gap sensor – which means you can print dumbbell labels, labels with notches at the edge and labels with off centre blackmarks.

It’s a shame it doesn’t use the ZBI 2 programming language, but it’s an entry level printer – and an extremely capable one at that.

Use the Zebra ZD410 for printing labels, tags and tickets that have a relatively short label life, due to the printers Direct Thermal capability.  By short life, it lasts months rather than years and certain thermal labels will discolour in the sun or if exposed to heat.  Ask us for some test labels if you’re unsure.

Another thing to note is the print width – just 56mm or 2.2 inches.  Don’t let the size limit you, we supply a wide range of labels that will fit the ZD410.

For pricing or if you have any questions on how you can use it, click through to our contact page and get in touch.  We’ve been working with Zebra printers since 1994 so there’s not much we’ve haven’t seen.  Want more information now?  Download the full spec sheet here.

Last weekend, when the sun finally made an appearance, I was out in Runnymede, Surrey with my family when I suddenly spotted a sign at the National Trust selling Criterion Ices!  We have been printing labels for Criterion Ices for the past 6 years and it was great to see their delicious ice creams on sale so far from their Suffolk roots.

If you need barcodes or short run labels like Criterion Ices, please contact us.  If you are lucky enough to see their ice cream on sale, have a coffee one … they’re awesome!

Congratulations on choosing a thermal barcode printer.  You’ve chosen the most reliable technology for printing high quality barcode labels.  Thermal printers will give you years of trouble free printing, at a cost below what a laser or inkjet can achieve.  That said, if you follow these  simple steps to care for your thermal barcode printer, you will extend the life of your printer and avoid faulty labels and barcodes that don’t scan.

All thermal printers use printheads.  Thermal printheads cost hundreds of pounds, rising steeply in price if you have a high resolution or a wide printhead.  Many people don’t realise they wear out and need replacing.  The printhead is one of only a couple of parts that need care on your printer.  Read on and learn how to care for your barcode printer.

How to care for your thermal barcode printer.

Here are eight things you can do to care for your thermal barcode printer and save money.

1. Run your printer at the lowest acceptable temperature or darkness setting.
2. Clean your printhead every time you change ribbons (or in the case of thermal labels, a roll of labels).  I know that sounds tedious, but with an alcohol cleaning wipe, it’ll only take a few seconds.  Contact us and we’ll send you out some complimentary printhead wipes.

   

3. Reduce printhead pressure.  With small desktop printers, you don’t have that option, but with larger industrial printers, there are thumb screws that allow you to reduce the printhead pressure.

   

4. If you’re using thermal ribbons, make sure they’re wide enough to cover the whole width of the labels you’re printing.
   
5. Slow your print speed.  The slower the better.
6. Test different thermal printer ribbons. Different formulations of ribbons can give great print results at a lower temperature – leading to longer thermal printhead life.  Contact us and ask for some sample ribbon for you to test.
7. Never take a knife or screwdriver to your printer.  If a label gets stuck, use isopropanol alcohol to clean the label off.  Sharp objects damage printers – and will end up costing you money.
8. If you’re using an industrial sized Zebra printer, ask us about their extended life printheads.  Zebra claim they’ll last twice as long as a standard printhead.  Contact us to check if your printer can take one of these printheads.