An industrial barcode printer is a device designed to print barcodes on labels or products.
Barcode printers usually come in the form of desktop label printers. They have interfaces through which specific information can be supplied, such as batch numbers for a production run or other details from a database.
Many industrial barcode printers are direct thermal printers, although most of them are thermal transfer printers. Thermal transfer printers, as the name says, use thermal transfer printing, a printing method where ink ribbons are melted to print a barcode on a label.
Industrial barcode printers are also available as drop-on-demand inkjet printers, which are Windows-based, use the exact amount of ink as necessary and provide a high-speed and quality printing. Drop-on-demand inkjet printers, on its turn, come in two types:
Industrial barcode printers often have features that standard computer printers do not support. For example, industrial barcode printers have automatic numerators that will ensure that a predefined higher or lower number in the required sequence is printed on each label.
Industrial barcode printers also have a date offset option that is of particular use to the packaging industry. This automatically moves the date forward from the current date by a specified number of days during printing so that the best before date can be automatically printed.