Featured guideHardware6 min
Thermal printer setup for part and location labels
A thermal printer is the cheapest piece of hardware in a parts operation and the one people fight with most. On older secondhand printers, a faint label is usually a settings problem before it's a printhead problem — darkness and speed first, then a clean printhead and platen, then the stock and the power supply. This guide covers the rest of the setup in the same spirit: the two ways software talks to a printer and why it decides which printers you can buy, USB versus network, direct thermal versus thermal transfer, roll versus fanfold, and the two sizes most shops run — 2 × 1 for parts and locations, 4 × 6 for packing slips.
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