We use the printer to print multi-line labels on clear plastic bags which are moved into position with the paging machine. The ROI on this investment is huge for us. Both the printer and paging machines arrived well packed and easy to assemble. The print quality is quite good. The printer is able to accommodate printing a large amount of unique labels in one file just like we need.
Even though it's not very hard to load and unload a USB drive, wifi connectivity would smooth the workflow. The touch screen is pretty good and so is the user interface, but good is not perfect and our operators do still get lost a bit.
The largest problem we have is remembering to update the current row field each time we load a new file as it requires scrolling to access the field and the modal it's in does not look like it can scroll so nothing is helping you realize it needs to be updated. It probably should just use the start row value when a new file is uploaded, or reset the current row to 1. Of course this probably breaks the folk flow used by other teams, these kinds of changes are not easy to implement and keep everyone happy. Perhaps a make an option that is configurable.
Last complaint about the printer, when our system generates the needed .xlsx files and then we download them via a browser over http(s) the printer throws an error when trying to send the file to print even though the other programs we've opened them with don't have problems. So we have to save the generated file to the web server or other file storage option like AWS S3 and then pull the file from there, that or load the http transferred file into something like Google Sheets and then redownload it as the printer likes the files after that. Not sure exactly what's going on with this yet, but we'll keep playing with it.
The paging machine is pretty good. If we load more than about 10 bags at a time they don't get separated well and can end up as a long line of bags without a break so the printer does not sense when to print; so we load them as lots of small stacks. With luck we'll manage to design a hopper that will let us load a hundred or so bags at a time.
Overall we're very happy to have to have this equipment; it saves a lot of hours over our previous bag labeling methods.
