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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."
I agree, this is a job for a simple dot matrix printer and continuous-forms labels. But it is tricky to print just one at a time, you have to design your label forms so your preprinted return address (and logo, whatever) is on the top half of the form, then you print the To: address on the bottom half of the label, so when you do a "form feed" the edge of the label clears the top of the print head and you can tear it off. In other words, the "top of form" mark is really halfway down the label, you start printing "line 1" in the middle of the label, then a Form Feed command pushes the label up so the tear-off perforation is above the printhead. Does that make sense? (BTW, you can probably tell I used to write programs to print labels on dot matrix printers)...
I used to sell a couple of varieties of dot matrix printers that avoided this problem with a clever forms-handling trick, it would pop up the top of the form above the printhead so you could rip off the form, then it would retract the form back down to the printhead so it could start printing on the top line of the next page. But I haven't seen a printer like that since the late 1980s. There used to be a few clever dot matrix printer designs that would allow you to print one label at a time with a slot-fed mechanism, I recall one IBM model from the early 1980s that did this, but AFAIK it was a unique design.
If I had to choose ONE printer above all others that was the best label printer EVER, it was the original Apple LaserWriter, or any other early 1st generation laser printer that used the early Canon laser engine (I think the HP LaserJet 1 was similar). These early models had a manual feed that was "corner fed" so you could print on something as small as a business card. I've never seen any other printer that could print on that small a label. You could probably find one of these early laser printers for cheap, and they were pretty indestructible since the mechanism was in the replaceable toner cart.