Barcode Printers for Your Business - Zebra S4M

Barcodes can be found on items inside grocery store. They are primarily used for easy scanning of the price and product information. Lines and spaces of various width creates a pattern that can be digitized by the barcode scanner speeding up the process for the customer and the business.

Using this technology, track and trace will be easy since digitized records can be stored and easily recovered. It will reduce the needed paper and pen for records, as the barcode pulls up data from database and provides data to the user readily. A technology that is developed for efficiency and adopted by successful busineses.

For selecting the barcode printer, select one that is designed for printing the barcodes. Excessive printing of barcode stickers on ordinary inkjet and laserjet cartridge with a sticker printer causes buildup of glue on the paper path of the printer. The heat makes the glue to stick on the paper path which will prevent proper output of paper from the printer. Also, printing a lot of barcode stickers on sticker paper requires cutting of the printout which will be a tedious task.

For barcode printing on a dedicated barcode printer, you will have fast printing of your barcodes. I used the Zebra printer as our barcode printer and was able to print our needed barcode stickers in few minutes.

The printer uses rolls of sticker paper of size 4 x 6 inches stickers and can be loaded to the paper feed for continues printing or smaller size like 4 x 1 inches. It utilizes a ribbon via thermal transfer. The LCD display shows the progress of printing. If an error occurs, it can be due to paper out, ribbon out or rear door openned which is intuitively displayed on the printer screen. Once the printer run out of ribbon, the ribbon roller is designed to remove the rolled used ribbon. Putting in the new ribbon is easy as fitting the new ribbon roll to the handle and extending the sticky end of ribbon to the ribbon roller.

I do printing via USB, but printer also supports serial and parallel connectors. Using a computer, you can download and install Bartender Trial from Seagull Scientific Inc. for an intuitive interface of creating your barcodes. The graphical interface of designing the barcode provides user friendly barcoding for beginners.