Question Cash Register Thermal Printers Question

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
H

hmunster123

Distinguished
May 27, 2014
189
6
18,685
I inherited a Star TSP100 Eco printer, thermal printer cash register printer. I'm a photographer and I wanted to see if I could print some of my photos on this thermal printer. I downloaded the drivers and software however the printer is greyed out in my list of devices/printers. I tried printing from photoshop but won't print although I see it in the printing queue.

When I plug in the usb cable it prints a receipt so it does operate on some level. I'm running Windows 10 and unistalled the driver and reinstalled but still won't print a photo and it won't print a photo from other software I have. I don't have the DK cable that you would connect to a cash register, not sure if this would make a difference. Any advice? Thanks.

Computer is a Lexmark PC All in One desktop
Windows 10
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
H

hmunster123

Distinguished
May 27, 2014
189
6
18,685
Oh ok, also it won't connect to bluetooth, it's asking for an ipv4 address. Does that matter?

Yes, it does print a text receipt but whatever is in the queue will not print

The device manager is saying it's not connected
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
H

hmunster123

Distinguished
May 27, 2014
189
6
18,685
Ok well I give up, it's now showing up when I try to print from photoshop and it's in my list on device manager but when I go to print it won't work. I've tried everything that I can think of.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
ex_bubblehead

ex_bubblehead

Titan
Moderator
Aug 24, 2012
16,247
1,516
87,240
Those printers are typically used in POS systems and are configured to print receipts (text) not graphics. They only have enough memory for one line and cannot be upgraded. The manual/s will have the DIP switch settings and such for other modes of operation.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
P

Paperdoc

Polypheme
Ambassador
Oct 19, 2006
11,269
1,028
69,340
We used a 9-pin dot matrix receipt printer for our retail store point-of-sale system for nearly 30 years, so I understand what they can and cannot do. A thermal printer common today is fundamentally the same. It prints black dots in a rectangular array typically 80 to 100 dots per inch, and that cannot be changed.

Those dots are either black or not there - there is no "grey". So that's a challenge for trying to get photos done with any reasonable range of dot darkness and image resolution. Now, using a common black-and-white laser printer that also can do only black or not, the dot size and spacing is typically 300 dpi, often much higher. But even at 300 dpi, what really happens is that the image is broken up into square "cells" of 8 x 8 dots, so you can print 37½ cells per inch on the page. Each cell can be printed with any of 8x8=256 possible dot patterns, so one can produce 256 levels of "grey', from white to black. Using a resolution of 37½ cells per inch at 256 grey levels per cell can produce a reasonable "black and white" photo. Double the basic printer resolution to 600 dpi and the photo becomes pretty good. BUT with 80 dpi on a thermal printer your 8x8 cell would be 1/10 " square, or 10 cells per inch, and the photo would look terrible even though each cell had 256 possible grey levels. So such printers were never designed to try to do that job, and do not have enough buffer memory for a data stream that huge.

Further, the process of breaking up the photo image into cells, translating each cell into an 8x8 dot pattern to produce a particular grey and then sending that all out is not done by the application software you use. It is done by the printer driver supplied by the printer maker. Since a thermal printer cannot produce any decent photo, the driver supplied has NO such routines to make it do the impossible.

The printer we used for this purpose had a lot of ability. It contained several alphabet sets, so you could set it to use one of those to specify what dot pattern it printed for any particular character code it received. It could change horizontal and vertical character spacing over a few possibilities. It could print reverse text - white characters on a black background. It could printer any arbitrary dot pattern you sent it for every 9-dot-high printing space, so in that way you could do basic graphics. I had ours set up to print (as an array of black dots on the white paper) our store's name logo at the top of each receipt. But I had to create that dot matrix image and store it in the point-of-sale software - there was no printer driver to create that data representation. The result looked good for that technology, but it was no photograph!
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
H

hmunster123

Distinguished
May 27, 2014
189
6
18,685
Driver was installed manually but I never did get this to work, gave up on it. Would attaching an ethernet DK cable help it work? As well as the USB. LIke I said earlier it does spit out a receipt when I plug the USB cable into the computer but it won't print anything from my computer. The feed button also doesn't print anything out, seems to be broken.I did install the driver and FutrePrnt software. I plan to throw this out today but thought I would run it by you one more time. Thanks.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom