Slashdot Mirror
One-at-a-time Mailing Label Printers?
An anonymous reader asks: "I work at a small law firm, and we are looking for a better way to print mailing labels. Currently, we print out an entire label sheet (30 labels) for each of our regular clients, storing them in binders. For one-offs, we use a typewriter. I'd like to find a label printer for around $250 (or less) to print labels one at a time. The challenge is that all the printers I can find are thermal print. Our fear is that a label may become unreadable due to heat exposure sometime during mailing. Even if label damage due to heat is rare, we cannot afford to take a chance since many of the documents we mail are time-sensitive. Also, we often send documents unfolded in large envelopes, so addressing #10 envelopes through a laser printer isn't enough -- we need labels!"
"The ideal printer would be non-thermal, e.g. inkjet, available through our network so anyone could print from their desktop, usable with some network printing device, and maybe even compatible with our Samba print server. Oh yeah, and I'd like it to be open enough that I can send text to it for printing, so maybe I can write a quick app to let users print labels from our client database, or make their own on the fly. Finally, I'm hoping to find a product that is not discontinued (e.g. Seiko EZ30), as surfing eBay for office equipment is not something my boss is willing to let me do."
No not ink jet, dot matrix!
http://www.okidata.com/mkt/html/nf/ML186Home.html
We still have several old Okidata printers at my office just for printing out multipart forms and for labels.
It is what we used back in the dark ages. Now if you could find an old Okidata 92 you would be all set. I think they will last until the sun goes nova.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You *can* print only one of those 30 labels at a time. I do it all the time.
Method of processing duck feet
Joel Splosky from Joel on Software had a similar problem and wrote it up here:
n ything.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HowToShipA
I wouldn't worry about label damage if you are using a good thermal printer -- UPS and FedEx both use thermal printers to produce their labels.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
At our office we use the Dymo Labelwriter 330 Turbo. Its a great product for exactly what you're looking for. Every day we print singles or hundreds of labels, primarily as shipping labels. Unless you're taking a lighter or some other intense heat source to the surface of the label, the ink isn't going to fade or become distored in any short amount of time. We've never had the quality of the label be at fault for a mis-delivered package. That's primarily left up to the human error, as always.
You should check out the two newest offerings from dymo. They have a 400 model, and one that prints to two different types of labels at once, which can be nice if you occaisionally need clear labels.
At the office I work at (a government agency, of course) we just print out #10 envelopes. If something needs to go out in a larger envelope, we just tape to secure the #10 to the larger envelope. If your really worried about the tape falling off, just buy a bunch of those clear document pouches like they use for UPS, and stick the #10 envelope in there. Those pouches don't come off without someone meaning to take it off, and then not easily.
Free MacMini
... for single labels is-- Dymo. We used them at the post office, we use them where I work now, they work well and consistantly. I've had ~3000 in the field at a time and seen only one or so a month. Good stuff.
Shadus
Don't bother with a normal laserjet or inkjet. Get a solid envelope printer like the PB DA400. Prints envelopes up to 13"x15". Bowes is expensive, but they have good service. I've used several printers like this on and this one. All seem to work well with the normal printer caveats of jams and running out of ink eventually.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Our fear is that a label may become unreadable due to heat exposure sometime during mailing.
Jesus fucking christ, get a clue. Thermal print technology is mature and robust. If you worry about heat in transit changing the label, then you should worry about your letter catching fire.
Even if label damage due to heat is rare, we cannot afford to take a chance since many of the documents we mail are time-sensitive.
If you can't take a chance with time delays or loss, then send everything by FedEx. Otherwise use the mail and stop sniveling.
Get a Dymo LabelWriter 330 Turbo. Yes, it's thermal, but it's wonderful. Mailing labels are around 10 cents - more expensive than Avery, but your staff productivity will be much higher. It's fast. It can be shared on a network as a regular windows printer. It has nifty software that can print zip codes, verify addresses, and mail-merge. It has a plugin to print labels directly from MS Word. It even comes with a well-documented API if you want to write your own app. Lots of different label sizes available. It's cheap.
UPS gives you an Eltron 2844 to print their labels on.
http://www.zebra.com/id/zebra/na/en/index/product
The thermal labels have a coating on them that makes the almost waterproof. If you use some sort of laser rolled printer, you have to consider water damage to the paper if you use cheap labels. THAT is more likely to be a problem than the whole heating issue.
I checked around and there are different grades of thermal paper, temperature ranges, and coating types. But like I said before, in almost 6 years and over 100,000 orders we have never seen a thermal label do that.
Fear Is the Only God
The challenge is that all the printers I can find are thermal print. Our fear is that a label may become unreadable due to heat exposure sometime during mailing.
There's different technologies. If you're talking about cash register receipt thermal paper, yeah, I'd not want that. OTOH, we use a SATO thermal printer with film ribbon and polyester labels to print MAC number and serial number labels for some of our products. The film ribbon/poly label is very, very durable and looks sharp.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
MS Office will allow you to print ONE label at the location of your choice on a sheet. I assume Open Office will to. What's the problem with that? Unless you have cash to blow...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I have written several applications that fetch and manipulate data and print to the Dymo 300/400 series USB label printers.
.LWL files. It is snippets of rtf formating mixed in with instructions on where to put the result, I think. I didn't figure out the whole thing, just enough to do what I needed to do.
The API is has several "levels". There is a OLE level which just sends signals to the Dymo Label application that comes with the printer -- this can be made to work, and is what I always ended up using. The "low-level" API they offer, a more standard way controlling the printer, simply doesn't work. Good luck getting any sort of technical support out of DYMO on any issues you run into.
They have example code in the SDK, which works. WHY it works is not documented. I created my own app, copied in the dymolbl.h and dymolbl.c files, and then spent a day compairing MS Visual Studio Project settings and diffing the makefile I made them generate. No luck.
At one point, I needed to do more than the OLE interface offered, and found myself reverse engineering the label files they send the printer, the
If you want to get a good thermal printer from the point of view of custom control, I advise a serial printer such as the Polymer Technology Systes Model LP2824, which is a re-branding of one of the printers from zebra.com. Download that PDF for that API and compare it to DYMO's documentation, and you will how an API should be documented. For office use, use the serial label printer from a linux machine that shares the printer, and place it next to where you store the stamps and envelopes -- make people print through an internal web site (as a side bonus, you can keep a log of when things were mailed, which can be incredibly helpful sometimes) and pick up the label when they get the envelope.
Lots of use of microsoft, in the end what he did was not any different than what every other place that ships a lot of stuff does.
Many of the comments that have been posted say that thermal printing is okay. If you buy good, expensive thermal stock, thermal printing lasts 5 years. Even the companies that sell the materials don't promise more than that, and that's only for very special stock.
Sometimes people keep documents for many years. In some cases, it could be inconvenient for the label to fade.
I've researched inkjet printers. There are inkjet receipt printers that might work for labels. But that's a research project, of course.
This one is available for ~USD300 a bit more than you wanted to spend but well worth it. It can do contact or thermal, is compact, durable and very configurable.
We use the Blaster Advantage, serial and network enabled. They are thermal transfer and use an ink ribbon, so no environmental heat damage problems. We print one at a time, but a few thousand a week so it can handle the load. There are other printers for bigger sized labels, we use them for UPC labels on our merchandise.
m
http://www.cognitive.com/printers/introduction.ht
echo
Well similiar cavets apply. The ink you use, and the surface you print on are important. The nice thing about inkjet is that it can print on a wider variety of surfaces, including fruit.* With the proper inkjet, those big envelopes are no problem. No need to go with labels.
*They can be faster too.
Another type of termal printer is called Termal transfer. It used a heating element and a ribbon. Where the printing occurs, the heat transfers the image to the label via the ribbon. this is much like those little label printers may people use now in place of the really old dymo click and spin label printer of yesteryear.
A good maker of label printers that work great is Sato America.
Like many people I bought into the DYMO brand and p[icked up their USB/serial desktop printer. But when it failed my business needs I fell back to my previous exprience with a jewelery manufcature and their projuct labeling needs. They used networked (via jetdirect ports) SATO thermal transfer printers, and those never failed.
The sato I picked up was a cx200 (which looks like its be replaced with a cx400) and is infact a straight thermal printer. I use it for mailing labels. they do not go bad on me in the mail / shipping process. however, if you just simply can not trust that technolgy has moved along far enought for your needs, then thermal transfer weorks better because the label itself is not heat sensitive.
Finally, I agree with the old school methodology of using a tractor feed dot matrix printer. Nothing beats old school tech. Except the user who hates the old school whine that comes with it.
I have a client who uses pre-printed (logo and reply) 6-per-page laser labels.
For small projects, we run the sheets thru a laser printer more than once to print as few as one label at a time.
A Word template for the label sheets make it easy to cut-paste the address into a spot where the label has not been used yet.
How about writing it with a pen? See how much faster that is c/f dealing with printer jams/ out of ink/blah.
What are of the law do you practice in? That may affect the overall response you'll get from the readers around here.
I'd recommend just using an old school 24 pin dot matrix printer, but that's me. They're great for some documents (tri-forms, etc); we print 3 copy magistrate letters on it because it punches through all 3 copies of the form (for the judge, the clerk, and us).
Your mileage may vary.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
You could always just print directly onto the letter sized envelope you intend to send through the mail.
If concerned about jamming, please only place the intended mailing contents into the envelope after you have printed on it.
Having once had the questionable honour of servicing printers that have been used for reprinting label sheets and peeling stickly labels off rollers that should never had adhesive applied to them, I would strongly suggest the whole-envelope printing option.
Or, as people have many times said here, use a dot matrix (although the risk of adhesive related printer ruining is almost unchanged there).
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Thermal really is the way to go. Inkjet labels will get smudged easily; they are very sensitive to moisture. Laser is OK, but it has a tendency to chip off with handling. Thermal labels are very hard to destroy. If the package heats up to the point where the label is impossible to read, it will catch fire. Besides, laser toner doesn't like heat, either -- it will melt and smudge. Just about everyone uses thermal printers. There is a good reason for that.
During breaks from college, I work in a warehouse where we handle millions (literally) of units of freight every year that make use of thermally printed labels. This includes pallets of product we receive off sealed trailers that bake everything during the summer, as well as being beat to hell by the retards that load and unload the trucks, and still the labels are readable and barcodes scan fine. Every box that ships out of the warehouse also has a thermal printed label that must be read by the scanners in the rather rough conveyor and sorter system. Smeared labels are never a problem.
"Inkjet will fade and smear horribly if it meets a single drop of water (rain, for instance). It won't last a week in the mail."
p pu_mar03.htm
*taps alienw on the shoulder*
That's only if it uses a water/organic solvent-based ink. Commercial inkjets use an oil-based ink.*
*Yes this is coming from someone who's worked for both a printer manufacturer and an ink maker (oddly enough both in the same neighbourhood)
http://www.chemsoc.org/chembytes/ezine/2003/kunja
A nice paper on inks.
Speaking of paper. The paper composition is the other half of a successful print, and has more technology than you think for something made from dead trees.
I personally have used a ton of Zebra products from the rebadged Eltrons that come from FedEx and UPS to their large industral quality printers. The 2844Z is easy to use, easy to clean, and has a well documented control language to control the printer. The Z stands for ZPL or Zebra Printer Language and is fully documented.
WARNING: The 2844 with no Z is the rebaged Eltrons that UPS send out. I have not had that great of success with them when doing anything but using them with UPS Worldship. They are durable printers in the warehouses of the world though, so your mileage may vary.
If you ever get some oil (maybe from a sorting machine, maybe from the postmans french fries) then your label is instantly ruined, it just turns black. Not a lot of oil needed either...
!ERR: Signature not found.
hmm... thermal labels in the middle of summer in the middle of the day in the middle of Tucson (that's in Arizona where it's fuckin hot!) parked for two hours? It could happen.
Sig Hansen?
Why not just print an entire label sheet (30 labels) for each of your regular clients and store them in binders?
What, exactly is wrong with that?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Our fear is that a label may become unreadable due to heat exposure sometime during mailing. Even if label damage due to heat is rare, we cannot afford to take a chance since many of the documents we mail are time-sensitive.
The odds of thermal labels not surviving transit due to their composition isn't "rare." It's much closer to "zero." I used to work for UPS tech support and have seen all kinds of labelling problems but never have I seen one illegible due to yellowing or thermal damage. Never. One day, I even stuck a thermal label to a black lamppost in Phoenix in summer--it was a year before it yellowed at all.
Don't worry about thermal tech. Seriously. Worst case, slap some packing tape on top if you're worried about grease/oil/etc.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
We all have our gripes about the post office, but seriously, they aren't so slow that you have to worry about letter not getting delivered because the address faded after a year or two. :-)
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
I bought my spouse a Dymo 400 for xmas ($80 or so at amazon). I was amazed by its speed and ease. One caveat: it came with a label test halfway stuck in and out of the case, without instructions for removing it. Needless to say, I chose to pull it the wrong way, and ended up with bits of label sticker stuck inside the thing. Didn't make for a happy xmas morning. Once I got it out it works great. I tested it on OS X and XP. No printer cartridges either. Deal.
can you not just use window envelopes and a template for your word processor that puts the address in a suitable place?
if you can't do this, why not write a macro that'll spit your address labels out of a real label printer like a Dymo or a Zebra Z4M+ when you print a letter?
Or setup your templates in Word to print the address labels to a different printer tray to your letter paper, and fill that printer tray with envelopes?
this is the kind of problem that i'd imagine a bit of thought could completely remove....