Label Printer
May. 22nd, 2018 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrottieI have a slightly unhealthy interest in stickers going back way before TBAG and pushing for communication and outreach through art there. Laptops are caked. It's a way I'll buy people's design and illustration work, and show it off. I'm delighted the laptop sticker thing took off. My Compaq Aero 4/25 laptop from the 90s is now hipster (4=486, 25=25mhz).
Bringing in a bunch of worldsbestbikestickers.com stickers to the TBAG bike count volunteer appreciation party and discovering TBAG ravenous may have clinched it. I got an ex-school Zebra label printer off the feabay (cheap!) after some research.
Label printers are basically universally thermal printers, but the thermal label stock for them is also crazy cheap, per label/foot/whatever. There are desktop models and battery powered portable models. Adding the complexity of a battery is perhaps frivolous but being able to throw a printer into my book bag has some novelty. The oldest generation of Zebra brand printers (there are a few other respectable manufacturers) that works with USB are the QL 220 plus, QL 320 plus, QL 420 plus series. The smallest of the series prints on stock 2" wide, with the 320 printing on 3" stock and the 420 on 4" stock. Linux support is advertised by I've been working from Windows 7 and those drivers are mostly fine.
I should note that I tried and failed to learn screen printing, but keep digging through community education catalogs for classes. Except expired chemicals, I should have what I need.
I tried 2"x2" labels and some narrower, longer labels, but the technology for detecting edges of labels and trying to keep the printer on the labels really doesn't seem to work. I had something of a system down turning off edge detection and just slightly tweaking the "page size" as I went to keep things centered. Then I got continuous label stock and decided just to cut the stickers apart with scissors. That adds to the lofi sticker effect, with a result somewhere between professional glossy vinyl stickers and paste paper stickers.
These things fade and I knew that, but a sticker outdoors for just a few weeks in the Arizona sun is half bleached out, and I don't think I was ready for that. That makes "lots of stickers cheap and quick" kind of at odds with the use case. People don't tend to put crappy stickers on their laptops (I do! I once peeled a "WAFER THIN" thermal label sticker off of a package of pork chops in a grocery store so I could stick it to that Compaq Aero). On the other hand, I have mixed feelings about vinyl stickers outside.
Going up beyond the level of thermal paper labels, you can get polypropylene, including different label printers than what I got that take resin ribbons that are actually recommended for outdoor use. So another iteration of this idea might be a desktop label printer with polypro labels and a resin ribbon. These ribbons are as wide as the label stock, and as long, on thin film. That too feels like a lot of plastic to me. Maybe the laser printer makes the most sense after all.
Label stock that may work in the laser (with some potential for jamming) is readily available, and that would be color and not fade, but gloss A4 stock labels were and are hard to find: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xgloss+A4+labels.TRS0&_nkw=gloss+A4+labels&_sacat=0
The thermal labels at least wind up being semi-gloss smooth because that's necessary for thermal printing. That avoids the name-tag effect, where the media just screams paper, but the OBEY kid did fine with that so maybe I shouldn't be so snobby.
They do make vinyl A4 sticker stock, but it is crazy expensive, at several dollars a sheet, and not even reflective at that. At that price, having stickers made professional is more cost effective.
If I take thermal semi-gloss paper stock and stick it in the laser, the fuser will turn it solid black, I predict (but why not experiment anyway?).
Yet another option would be feeding these semi-gloss thermal paper labels through a friction feed dot matrix printer. Later model 21 pin printers printed pretty crisp, but they never print a dark shade of black, and it sounds like the world's tiniest machine gun going off while it prints. Especially compared to how this thermal printer just vomits stuff out at up to 3" a second, dot matrix is slow. But technically, that would work. They even started making two color dot matrix printers, where the ribbon has a black top half and a red bottom half and the ribbon shifts up or down to get one or the other under the print head. I could have a whole other color! A vanishing few fancy models, apparently a speciality of Panasonic, added additional colors and wound up with big fat ribbon cartridges to house the colors, peaking at red, blue, yellow, black. I am endlessly fascinated by the pinnacles of obsolete technologies.
Really, I shouldn't have gotten rid of the dot matrix printer I had. I knew I'd miss it. I had CUPS set up so I could send PostScript to CUPS and it would do Epson emulation or whatever with the printer.
Huh. I was thinking of full sized dot matrix printers, but Googling it, it seems like dot matrix tech lives on for receipt and label printers just because it can do multiple colors and thermal can't (though Zebra has a custom made services where different parts of the label print in different colors when they print so you can color code things even though you can't actually mix colors), but those look like they're all 7 pin, low resolution printers and nothing suggests that they know how to do graphics.
The first printer I owned was an Okidata home thermal printer for the Atari 8 bit. I only ever used resin ribbons (in this case, narrow and very long, instead of like the receipt and label printers), never thermal paper. There's one on fleabay right now: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Okidata-Okimate-20-Color-Printer-Original-Packaging-and-Box/272975795594
It was fun learning how to do graphics with it, and breaking up graphics into 21 bit wide strips that were sent 7 bits at a time (if I remember this correctly). Color printing worked by way of color resin ribbons that had a page-wide strip of cyan, then magena, then yellow, then black. It printed each line four times, once with a length of ribbon of each color. You did not get very many pages from a ribbon this way, nor was it fast. My print routines started in BASIC and evolved into assembly.
Much later, I had access to a thermal printer that managed colors by keeping a little tape cartridge for each color, and had an honest to goodness little tape robot storage system. It would print the page in one color, go back to the top, shuffle tape cartridges in its little tape library and pick out the next one, print on that color, and repeat. You could even print white on black, or gold or silver, with the right tape carts. That too was a lot of plastic waste for not very many pages, but on gloss paper, the color was fantastic.
Given infinite money and space for toys, the Panasonic four color printer would be nice, but realistically, fucking around at this point will probably be with different label stocks.
The print contrast of the Zebra -- before sun bleaching -- is great, and the resolution is good enough to be interesting. Photos, if not too busy, are recognizable and the effect can be good. The QL 220 does 384 dots across. Fucking around in Gimp is always a pleasant distraction.
Bringing in a bunch of worldsbestbikestickers.com stickers to the TBAG bike count volunteer appreciation party and discovering TBAG ravenous may have clinched it. I got an ex-school Zebra label printer off the feabay (cheap!) after some research.
Label printers are basically universally thermal printers, but the thermal label stock for them is also crazy cheap, per label/foot/whatever. There are desktop models and battery powered portable models. Adding the complexity of a battery is perhaps frivolous but being able to throw a printer into my book bag has some novelty. The oldest generation of Zebra brand printers (there are a few other respectable manufacturers) that works with USB are the QL 220 plus, QL 320 plus, QL 420 plus series. The smallest of the series prints on stock 2" wide, with the 320 printing on 3" stock and the 420 on 4" stock. Linux support is advertised by I've been working from Windows 7 and those drivers are mostly fine.
I should note that I tried and failed to learn screen printing, but keep digging through community education catalogs for classes. Except expired chemicals, I should have what I need.
I tried 2"x2" labels and some narrower, longer labels, but the technology for detecting edges of labels and trying to keep the printer on the labels really doesn't seem to work. I had something of a system down turning off edge detection and just slightly tweaking the "page size" as I went to keep things centered. Then I got continuous label stock and decided just to cut the stickers apart with scissors. That adds to the lofi sticker effect, with a result somewhere between professional glossy vinyl stickers and paste paper stickers.
These things fade and I knew that, but a sticker outdoors for just a few weeks in the Arizona sun is half bleached out, and I don't think I was ready for that. That makes "lots of stickers cheap and quick" kind of at odds with the use case. People don't tend to put crappy stickers on their laptops (I do! I once peeled a "WAFER THIN" thermal label sticker off of a package of pork chops in a grocery store so I could stick it to that Compaq Aero). On the other hand, I have mixed feelings about vinyl stickers outside.
Going up beyond the level of thermal paper labels, you can get polypropylene, including different label printers than what I got that take resin ribbons that are actually recommended for outdoor use. So another iteration of this idea might be a desktop label printer with polypro labels and a resin ribbon. These ribbons are as wide as the label stock, and as long, on thin film. That too feels like a lot of plastic to me. Maybe the laser printer makes the most sense after all.
Label stock that may work in the laser (with some potential for jamming) is readily available, and that would be color and not fade, but gloss A4 stock labels were and are hard to find: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xgloss+A4+labels.TRS0&_nkw=gloss+A4+labels&_sacat=0
The thermal labels at least wind up being semi-gloss smooth because that's necessary for thermal printing. That avoids the name-tag effect, where the media just screams paper, but the OBEY kid did fine with that so maybe I shouldn't be so snobby.
They do make vinyl A4 sticker stock, but it is crazy expensive, at several dollars a sheet, and not even reflective at that. At that price, having stickers made professional is more cost effective.
If I take thermal semi-gloss paper stock and stick it in the laser, the fuser will turn it solid black, I predict (but why not experiment anyway?).
Yet another option would be feeding these semi-gloss thermal paper labels through a friction feed dot matrix printer. Later model 21 pin printers printed pretty crisp, but they never print a dark shade of black, and it sounds like the world's tiniest machine gun going off while it prints. Especially compared to how this thermal printer just vomits stuff out at up to 3" a second, dot matrix is slow. But technically, that would work. They even started making two color dot matrix printers, where the ribbon has a black top half and a red bottom half and the ribbon shifts up or down to get one or the other under the print head. I could have a whole other color! A vanishing few fancy models, apparently a speciality of Panasonic, added additional colors and wound up with big fat ribbon cartridges to house the colors, peaking at red, blue, yellow, black. I am endlessly fascinated by the pinnacles of obsolete technologies.
Really, I shouldn't have gotten rid of the dot matrix printer I had. I knew I'd miss it. I had CUPS set up so I could send PostScript to CUPS and it would do Epson emulation or whatever with the printer.
Huh. I was thinking of full sized dot matrix printers, but Googling it, it seems like dot matrix tech lives on for receipt and label printers just because it can do multiple colors and thermal can't (though Zebra has a custom made services where different parts of the label print in different colors when they print so you can color code things even though you can't actually mix colors), but those look like they're all 7 pin, low resolution printers and nothing suggests that they know how to do graphics.
The first printer I owned was an Okidata home thermal printer for the Atari 8 bit. I only ever used resin ribbons (in this case, narrow and very long, instead of like the receipt and label printers), never thermal paper. There's one on fleabay right now: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Okidata-Okimate-20-Color-Printer-Original-Packaging-and-Box/272975795594
It was fun learning how to do graphics with it, and breaking up graphics into 21 bit wide strips that were sent 7 bits at a time (if I remember this correctly). Color printing worked by way of color resin ribbons that had a page-wide strip of cyan, then magena, then yellow, then black. It printed each line four times, once with a length of ribbon of each color. You did not get very many pages from a ribbon this way, nor was it fast. My print routines started in BASIC and evolved into assembly.
Much later, I had access to a thermal printer that managed colors by keeping a little tape cartridge for each color, and had an honest to goodness little tape robot storage system. It would print the page in one color, go back to the top, shuffle tape cartridges in its little tape library and pick out the next one, print on that color, and repeat. You could even print white on black, or gold or silver, with the right tape carts. That too was a lot of plastic waste for not very many pages, but on gloss paper, the color was fantastic.
Given infinite money and space for toys, the Panasonic four color printer would be nice, but realistically, fucking around at this point will probably be with different label stocks.
The print contrast of the Zebra -- before sun bleaching -- is great, and the resolution is good enough to be interesting. Photos, if not too busy, are recognizable and the effect can be good. The QL 220 does 384 dots across. Fucking around in Gimp is always a pleasant distraction.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-23 01:20 pm (UTC)I am still kicking myself somewhat for getting rid of my previous inkjet printer because it was fantastic for photographs on glossy paper. The photos in the bathroom were printed with it, for example.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-23 03:43 pm (UTC)Inkjets can do some beautiful work. Photos really are their niche, but the only time I print digital photos is when sending paper-blog to my father. Hmm.