I mentioned in an earlier post that the Dir command (used to rotate images, text, and barcodes) works differently in the PM and PX series when applied to images. The PX series printer can only rotate an image by 180 degrees but the PM series can rotate images at 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees. Here’s a label that prints an image using all four Dir parameters:
The way around this is to rotate your images (I like IRfanview) ahead of time and print all of your images at Dir 1 and both printer will behave the same.
While we’re on the subject of IRfanview, you can greatly reduce the size of your images by reducing them to 2 bits per pixel. Thermal and thermal transfer printers can only print in black or white, so anything beyond 2 bpp is a waste of space. For example, here’s an image that we had to use in a Fingerprint program:
At 16 bits per pixel this image used 2,718,478 bytes of storage. After conversion to 2 bits per pixel it was only 340,262 bytes, an almost 90% reduction in size with no loss of resolution.