TOP 3 ZEBRA PRINTER SETTINGS MISTAKES
Today I’m going to bring to light some of the most common settings mistakes made when people decide to configure their own Zebra thermal label printers. It’s surprising how often these mistakes are made and how easy it is to get back on track, some mistakes will lead to missing parts of your label while other settings if interpreted incorrectly can lead to excessive wear on the consumables and shorten the life of your label printer.
MISTAKE 1: DARKNESS
It’s very easy to misinterpret the darkness setting on Zebra label printers, since thermal printing is usually a single colour. It does in-fact make the image darker but only to a point because what it actually does is decide how long to apply power to the printhead elements. The wording alone is enough to sew disaster as you want the label you are printing to be as dark and clear as possible. In reality the darkness only needs to be high enough to produce a good quality transfer or image in the case of direct thermal printing.
Using higher darkness than required can cause bleeding/blurry images, ribbon snapping, ribbon melting and sticking to the printhead, much higher printhead wear than required making this easily the most expensive mistake. Too low and you will get a faded/poor quality transfer often leaving you with an unreadable label. Set the darkness as low as possible while maintaining a good quality transfer/image to reduce the wear on your printhead.
MISTAKE 2: PRINT LENGTH(HEIGHT)
Labels are usually a set size for example 4x6 Inches, sometimes termed as label height this setting has the power to cause chaos. If you’re label height is set incorrectly it can lead to lots of random media out errors. Most modern label printers are set to auto-calibrate and determine the height on their own however Zebra label printers are great at doing what they are told. If a label length command is sent to the printer it will change the label length regardless of what it’s sensed.
Commonly not setting a windows driver to use printer settings or not changing the default length in label design software causes these media out errors and inconsistent printing too. Make sure your label height is set correctly in whatever ZPL, driver or label design software to avoid this headache.
MISTAKE 3: TEAR OFF POSITION
TEAR OFF setting is the last of the top 3 settings mistakes and the main reason for this is it’s not used nearly enough as it should be. Plenty of times a label get’s stuck to the platen roller eventually causing a jam, the most common reason for this is that the tear position is not set correctly. The middle of the gap in-between the labels should rest on the tear bar to give you a perfect tear without pulling the backing away from the next label as that normally results in the label sticking to the platen roller. Normally with correctly set label lengths it shouldn’t be an issue but it’s a common problem among companies that use label design software to create their labels.