I setup our logo on my Ithaca Itherm280 last night. I was able to get the logo to work with both tag under ticket templates and storing the logo on the printer.
My question is this:
<BMP> method quality is drastically better, however the printer doesn't print until about 10 seconds after the job is sent. I can only assume this is due to the size or complexity of the image. Is there any fix to this? I have a serial printer, maybe using a USB to Comm Port would have a faster data transfer?
Using printer storage works and its very quick however the quality of the image is required to be monochrome and dpi is very low. I can't get my logo to look right using this method.
You could try converting your image to something more basic like black and white symbol. Do your conversion yourself so you can get desired look and then try sending it to printer. You could maybe reduce its original size as well.
I have networked printers for the bar and kitchen, but I need to use what I have and I have about 6 serial thermal printers. I’m just thinking that maybe the logo will print faster if I’m using a usb to comm port adapter. I guess I’ll try a little later.
I was able to get the logo to about 15k, but it still takes about 8 seconds to print. I’m assuming does some conversions before sending the logo to the printer.
I dont think BMP will ever be as quick as loading the image into the printer itself, obviously your sending the image over each print rather than it being held in the printer.
I use an Epson TM-T88V, which IMO is the Cadillac of Thermal Printers. It is extremely fast (over 2x as fast as even other Epson printers). It is connected via USB.
I store my logo (~40K) in NVRAM, and it looks great and prints like lightning. On the other hand, when I tried using the BMP tag, I had the opposite experience in terms of quality - it looked worse, with horizontal bands through the image. And it was slightly slower to print.
The obvious drawback is that the 88V is expensive compared to most.
I will try to remember to relay my experience with a new setup I’m doing using an Epson TM-T20II (about half the price of the 88V). I already know it is slower to print overall, but I’ll let you know how image printing goes.
Certain compromises will always have to be made for images on a thermal printer at the end of the day, obviously monochrome for a start.
They are geared towards speed rather than graphic quality
My logo needs the use of shades of black and white to look smooth. When I convert to monochrome I loose a lot of quality.
seems to be fine with shades of black and white. Hence the print comes out much better.
I’ll try and put up some shots later tonight of the difference in quality. If anyone has any ideas of how to increase quality of a monochrome image let me know. The program I upload the image to the printer with converts it so I don’t have a choice to not convert to monochrome if the image is stored on the printer.
Does a thermal printer do shading? I always thought they were black and white - not even monocrome.
Im pretty sure I’ve seet the use of dots rather than shading for some more complex logos - ie more dots closer together for darker shading.
Maybe its not shading, but when I send to the printer using my logo looks more like an image and less like a group of dots. When I print using the printer storage is completely black and white and very pixelated.
The image output from NVRAM on my 88V certainly looks like smooth greyscale - no visible dots… the science behind how it achieves this I don’t know, but it looks great.
I have a color image and a B&W (greyscale) image sitting in my archive. I don’t remember which one I uploaded to the printer, but the name of color one is specifically tagged as RECEIPT, while the BW is not.
It is also named with these characteristics: logo_2.65x2_300dpi_RECEIPT.png
The BW is named as such: logo_BW_510.png, and it’s dimensions are noticeably smaller than the color version, likely less dpi.
In case anyone was wondering how this turned out… I was finally able to get a solid product. For some older printers on a serial connection the logo method produced a great quality image without much adjustment to the actual image, however it would take to long to print the ticket… nearly 12 seconds. So, for anyone else working with Ithaca brand iTherm printers this is what I came up with.
(I wanted to post this for anyone else with these printers wanting an image on their ticket)
Again this is for Ithaca iTherm printers (I have iTherm280)
Resize image hopefully its a vector image to max dpi 203 and size it a little larger than the size you actually want. My turned out to be 260 x 198. (you may need to play with this)
2.Download and open PJColor and set your comm port, emulation, and resolution.
**if your windows printer driver is installed to this printer temporarily change that printer properties to a different comm port as the program needs it open to communicate with the printer
Load the image to the printer, select high resolution, center image, view the preview, do a test print “send to printer”, click store in printer, change name to Logo, and click record.
Change the settings back on the printer windows driver to the right comm port.
Open SambaPOS, go to your printer template.
The code to make this print on your receipt is from their programmers manual it is &%URLogo&
*if you named the image something else when recording it change the word logo to the name.
And there you go. Print away… Here is my result.
This printer does not do a very good job with grey-scale. There are dithering or diffusion dots throughout and it looks terrible. I ended up converting my logo to pure black and white for a good result. It prints sufficiently fast.
