What Is Thermal Transfer?
Because the amount of products produced and sold each year in supermarkets and local stores, there has appeared a need to facilitate the processes of selling, and keeping track of products and production lines. Barcodes are used on all sorts of products and barcode printers generate them. Like any other printer, a barcode printer is a computer peripheral specialized in printing these codes for further use. Thermal barcode printers have become valuable for those who need to enter product information in large retail chain and other shopping location. There also are industrial barcode printers used in large warehouses and plants to help the personnel during the inventory and automation processes. There are two main types of barcode standards, the UPC and the EAN. UPC stands for Universal Product Code Bar Code and it represents the standard bar code printed on most of the retail products. The code holds information about the vendor's ID ad the product's number. All these are read when the barcode is passed over a scanner. The EAN represents the European Article Numbering standard. Europe uses two versions of bar codes: the EAB 13 and the EAN 8. The numbers after the standard's name represents the amount of digits used in generating the barcode (for example, books in order to be able to hold the ISBN information and pricing details require the use of EAN 13 with its 13 digits). There are one dimensional bar codes (they use the bar's width to encode the product's details) and there also are two dimensional bar codes (PDF417 and MaxiCode are two examples of two dimensional bar codes). This type of bar codes are scanned both vertically and horizontally and they are used for their ability to store more data than one dimensional bar codes. You can use specialized barcode printers to print out these codes. There are two main types of barcode printers: those that use the Direct Thermal method (also called DT) and those that utilize the Thermal Transfer method (called TT). Printers that utilize the Direct Thermal method have a print head to generate heat. This amount of heat triggers a chemical reaction in the special paper used that turns the paper black. This method is used in less expensive thermal barcode printers, but the printed barcodes can get damaged if exposed to chemicals, direct sun light or a heat source. These types of thermal barcode printers also require a special maintenance, as their ribbon must be clean at all times. Thermal barcode printers that use the thermal transfer method also use heat to print the barcode, but they do not act on the special paper. Instead, they heat a special device in their printing head so it melts a special waxy substance from a ribbon that that runs over the label. From this ribbon, under the effect of heat, ink is transferred to the paper. The thermal barcode printers can print on a variety of media and you can find any types of thermal barcode printers you need, from those for your small office to industrial ones, suitable for large manufacturing plants. |
