The Honeywell PM and PC series of printers are available with color displays. You can also order these without displays to save some money and use the LEDs/icons instead.
We don’t sell these printers without displays. The display gives you immediate access to the configuration menus, wizards, and error messages that make support work far easier. Here’s a display and icon printer that have run out of labels:
Notice that there is a Wizard button under the message on the display unit. Pressing this will show a user how to install labels in a series of step by step pictures.
Printers are normally assigned a static IP address, or a reserved IP address via DHCP. But, when you first connect a printer to the network, how do you know the IP address that it has been assigned? This is easy with a display, it can be shown on screen. With an icon printer you have to first set up the media type, then calibrate the printer, wait two minutes and press and hold the feed key for three seconds. Test labels will print that show the current IP address of the printer, as long as the labels are the correct size and the IP doesn’t print off the side of the label or on the gap in between labels. Or you can make a static ARP entry using the printer’s MAC address on your PC, browse to the printer and set up a static IP, but that’s beyond most users.
There are some features that are only available with printers with displays. One of my favorites is the print quality wizard. The two things that determine the print quality of thermal printers are speed and heat. In general, slower printing yields better quality, and the heat applied by the printhead needs to be matched to the speed and materials used. There are three types of ribbons (wax, wax/resin, resin) and many types of label materials. Getting the right settings can be challenging.
The print quality wizard first asks you for the print speed (go slow!) and then prints five different labels using different media sensitivity settings. It then asks you to pick the best of the five and then prints three more labels at different darkness setting and again asks you to pick the best one. This is usually sufficient to dial in the settings properly, but you can manually change the print contrast for additional control, if needed.
These printer are also programmable, and having a display makes software a whole lot more user friendly.
If you are worried about user’s getting into the menu system and messing up your settings you can control access to the menu system through the menu system or the printer’s; web interface:
You can disable access to the menu system, or enable it with a required PIN number to log in.
The difference in price between a PC43 with a display and one without is less than $69, well worth it. The same advice applies to the PM43 series.
One more tip on buying a PC43 printer: if you want a LAN connection for your printer, order it separately and install it yourself. If you order a PC43 with Ethernet already installed it is $131.20 (at our discounted price) more expensive, and the adapter ordered separately is $104. Installation of the adapter is very easy. All you need is a small Philips screwdriver and it won’t take more than a couple of minutes to install.