Epson POS Receipt Printers
Epson receipt printers are extremely reliable point of sale printers for the most demanding environments. The Epson Thermal models such as the TM-T88V series and the more affordable TM-20III have been tested and approved for use with RedTail POS.
Choose from a wide variety of 3" slips types within our system. We have designs for both 76 column and 80 column printers. Epson Thermal printer models use either 3" paper rolls or 3 1/8" rolls. Both model printer work just fine with RedTail POS.
Epson thermal printers are not only extremely fast printing devices but also have no ink or cartridges and require little maintenance.
Using Thermal Printers in Food and Beverage Environments:
All thermal printers must use thermal paper for its print jobs. Technically speaking, thermal printing (or direct thermal printing) is a digital printing process which produces a printed image by passing paper with a thermochromic coating, commonly known as thermal paper, over a print head consisting of tiny electrically heated elements. The coating turns black in the areas where it is heated, producing an image. Thermal printers are extremely fast, essentially taking mere seconds to generate invoices and receipts. However, in kitchen environments where ovens are present thermal slips will turn black (black smudge) when they come in direct contact with heat, essentially resulting in an unreadable slip. For this reason, the much slower performing impact printers are more commonly used in kitchen environments.
Our Own Testing:
When we installed Epson thermal printers in kitchens with commercial ovens printed thermal order slips became unreadable when in contact with direct heat. Both thermal paper that comes with the Epson thermal printers as well as thermal paper from an office supplies store rendered the same results.
Alternate Models:
We have also tested a Star Thermal Bluetooth model which had much better results with a higher tolerance for direct heat. Placing the slips directly on a hot oven did result in black smudging but there was little or no smudging when placed on product that was sitting on top of a commercial oven (i.e. pizza box) or when placed inside a heated sealed food package (i..e paper bag stapled closed)
Impact Printing:
The Epson TMU-220 series printer is a commonly used impact (dot matrix) printer used in fast food and restaurant environments, particularly in kitchens. Impact printed slips are not susceptible to black smudging and are therefore the most commonly used printers in these type of environments. The big drawback is speed. While thermal printers take just a second or two to print an entire slip, impact printers are much slower. For this reason many fast food or restaurant establishments have thermal printers out front for receipt printing and impact printers in the kitchen for order slip printing. Although these printer are quite reliable they do have mechanical parts that may require maintenance or repair at some point in time. Things like sprocket wear or pint heads are common items that fail. Keep in mind that kitchen the environments are much harder on all equipment and for this reason alone, printers undergo an increased level of maintenance, regardless of model chosen.
