Ticket Printer

[peternewman]

If you're still looking at the laser option, two thoughts, firstly are you sure it won't auto feed from the front tray. Most laser printers I've encountered will, although with a reduced capacity compared to a normal tray. Secondly, for some, such as the HP LJ4000 you can get envelope feeders which fit in the front, if you opened the rear tray that would be an almost straight paper path so might work better with your card stock.

[dbuckley]

Am now the proud owner of TSP400 and am having fun getting to grips with programming it :huh:

 

House is beginning to look like a supermarket checkout dustbin...

[JohnD]

OK, I have now come to the conclusion that we would be better off switching to Thermal printer.

 

Any suggs on a supplier of card stock for tickets, or what sort of printer to look at? We typically sell about 500 tickets per 6-day run, sold over as period of a few weeks, with the box offivce open every morning for casual sales. We use a Northech Box-Office package which our numerous FOH staff are familiar with

 

We do not have experience of using Thermal Printers so it would be useful to hear from other small theatres who have taken this path. Shoule we buy two to allow for one breaking down? What should we expect to pay per printer and (say) 5,000 pre-printed tickets to our design?

 

TIA

[matt_h]

Any suggs on a supplier of card stock for tickets, or what sort of printer to look at?

 

For preprinted stock we use Dave Sanger - 01793 881313

 

As far as printers go we use Star Micronics TSP700II, any of the TSP range will likely do what you want and more. If you lookfurther up the topic you'll see a link to DED POS where I buy the majority of our EPOS hardware from. I won't say what we pay for the printers, but expect list to be around the £200 mark

 

Should we buy two to allow for one breaking down?

 

Personally I wouldn't bother, thermal printers are designed to be that much more reliable than inkjets/lasers. You won't be using it heavily and if the worst comes to the worst could you go back to the inkjet for 24hrs whilst a replacement is shipped to you?

[jamblob]

As far as printers go we use Star Micronics TSP700II

 

We're considering getting a couple of these but I need to get some quotes for ticket stock too and I'm unsure how to specify them. The two things I'm not sure about are:

 

1) Black marks: Do these have to be located on the leading edge of the ticket or can the sensor be adjusted?

 

2) Ticket width: The spec says "80mm standard, 82.5 and 58mm with paper guide". Does this mean the tickets have to be one of those widths or is that a sliding scale?

 

Thanks for any insight you can offer.

[matt_h]

1) Black marks: Do these have to be located on the leading edge of the ticket or can the sensor be adjusted?

 

Black marks on the leading and trailing edges on the reverse side (ie not the side that the printer prints on). The printer will cut the ticket in the middle of the black mark. No the sensor cannot be adjusted, I'm not quite sure what you want to achieve by moving the sensor? Surely you want it to get to the end of the ticket and then cut it of the roll?

 

2) Ticket width: The spec says "80mm standard, 82.5 and 58mm with paper guide". Does this mean the tickets have to be one of those widths or is that a sliding scale?

 

I'm fairly sure it means that they need to be one of those 3 sizes. All of the thermal printers at work use an 80mm wide thermal roll (receipt as well as ticket), and if my memory serves me correctly the other standard for POS applications is 58mm (mostly used for credit card machines).

 

HTH

 

Matt