All Labels Are Not The Same

Many of the labels printers we sell are beautifully printed, using flexo or digital technology, ready to be applied to our customer’s products. We also make a lot of thermal printers that are used on print tabletop printers – these are usually applied to logistic items such as shipping cases, shrink-wrapped trays and pallets. The barcodes that are printed on the labels are used to ensure the packages are correctly routed through the supply chain to their final destination.

When you look at label printers, it is easy to think that they are all the same and it is alright to buy the cheapest. This is far from correct and here is an example that shows this:

A distribution center for a large sports products company uses our barcode printer to print and apply labels to products of various sizes. While the equipment was working really well, the customer was having difficulty maintaining good print quality (a barcode scanner installed right after the labeling system would often reject the barcodes) and also was having to replace print heads more often than would normally be expected.

There are two important settings in the thermal print engine that can define the print quality. The print speed which is measured in inches per second (IPS) and the print darkness, measured on a scale of 0 -30 with 30 being maximum darkness. This WP300B printer that has a maximum print speed. Because of the high-speed nature of the line, this is the speed setting being used. Generally, it is more difficult to get good print quality at high print speed settings.

What does this mean for the customer?

Our label printers are designed to produce excellent barcode quality and there is no reason that barcodes should fail to read after the label is applied. We don’t like having to run the printers at the The labels that our customer was using, needed more energy to produce the image than the Winpal Label Printers and it was also noted that they had a slight gloss finish. We wondered if this surface finish was causing reflections that might be affecting the barcode scanner.

The message here is that while it might be tempting to buy low cost, poor quality labels, this is very likely to cause downtime on packaging lines and increased maintenance costs on labeling and printing equipment. We hugely encourage our customers to use good quality labels printers– either the ones we are reliable supplier.

 Why use Winpal Label Printers?

Labels that are made in any of our label converting plants are engineered to work exceptionally well with barcode printers. We use only top quality materials and have total control over the die-cutting process on our modern converting equipment.

You can also visit this page for more information - Label Printers

label printer


Post time: Dec-17-2021