Issues with Thermal Transfer Labels

 Thermal transfer printers are products which print on paper and on other material by melting a certain coating of ribbon, which helps it stay glued to the material on which the print gets applied. Thermal transfer printers are slightly different from thermal printers, which do not use any ribbon. Thermal transfer printers are used in industry in various capacities, some of which include barcode labels to mark cloth labels and printing plastic labels for chemical containers.                
Thermal Transfer Printers, also often called as Barcode Printers, come in fixed sizes with width close to 4,6 or 8 inches. There have been manufacturers in the past who have produced these machines in differing sizes. This is where the first issue lies:

ü    Thermal Transfer Labels are very diverse in size. They are available in multiple lots and very unpredictable in availability. Though a standardized version has been released, it is not the case everywhere. The barcode level and shipping identification still differs.

These thermal transfer labels make use of a thermal print head with fixed width, press onto a plastic label through a driven rubber roller. There is a thermal transfer ribbon sandwiched between the print head and label. This is often polyester and gets coated on the label side. The ribbon gets spooled onto reels and driven through the applied printing mechanism in sync with labels. Concurrently, tiny pixels across the width of print head are put through extreme temperatures to melt the ink. Due to this process, the printers are very agile and print at blitz speed.            

This is where the second issue comes in:

ü    Though thermal transfer labels have become very sophisticated and empowered with powerful processors and huge memories, the trend is not that seamless across the whole spectrum of printers.
The transfer labels mainly come in two types, Thermal and Thermal Transfer. To suit multiple applications, one can choose from a plethora of special adhesives and materials. These include the likes of paper packaging labels, durable rating plates, tamper evident labels etc.
The printing of these printers is relatively faster than that of the dot matrix printers. They are smaller and lighter in size and also consume less power. This makes them highly portable and transferrable. They are used extensively at multiple and diverse sites including the likes of filling station pumps, information kiosks, point of sale systems, voucher printers in slot machines, print on demand labels, hospitals etc.     
After weighing in all the pros and cons, one thing that ought to be realized quite clearly is these printers are invaluable and indispensable to any facility and ought to be considered and thought of very highly for a lot of reasons. The reasons for their availability are evident, and the fact justifying that claim is the number of printouts one usually requires. It is good to have them around for simplifying things.