Three Tips to Keep Your Printer in Top Condition

No one printing more than a handful of labels a day would consider using anything other than a thermal printer such as Zebra, Intermec and Datamax. Thermal printers are fast, cheap to run, ideally suited to printing barcodes and extremely reliable, so much so, we’ve found ourselves working with printers more than ten years old.

Here are three things you can do to keep costs down, maintain quality and keep on printing:

Clean your printhead.

You MUST clean your printhead every time you change labels or ribbons. Labels leave an abrasive paste on your printhead which wears away the ceramic coating and eventually stops the printhead from working. Cleaning only takes a few seconds to do and will add years onto your printhead. Watch this 1 min 16 sec video from Zebra to see how. Click here for the youtube video. Call us on 01359 271 111 and ask for a FREE printhead cleaning pack.

Keep the temperature down.

Thermal printers use… heat to print with. The printhead melts the wax on the ribbon and an image appears. The higher the temperature, the faster the printhead burns out. You need to keep the printhead running as cool as possible. How do I reduce the print temperature? Open your label printing software and look under the page settings in the printer driver. Look for the darkness (or density) setting and experiment. Reduce the temperature to a point where it’s as low as possible to get quality print results. At the same time you can adjust the print speed. If you lower the print speed you can lower the printhead temperature.

Think Ribbon Width

Ribbons should overlap the labels by at least 3mm each side. Think of labels as being sandpaper. The printer ribbon provides the printhead with a soft plastic protection from the abrasive label material. Without that protection, the printhead will wear out where the label material is rubbing against the head. Call us on 01359 271 111 to find out what ribbon would suit you best.

Expert Labels Limited were known as Barcode Products until Octover 2015. We supply labels made from hundreds of different materials and thousands of different sizes. We understand label printing all the way through from choosing the best thermal printer, label design software to the best labels and ink combination designed to save your wallet as well as your printer.