Hello Anthony,
At 11:31 AM 6/06/2004, Anthony Dzikiewicz wrote:
Much has been considered. These are retail cashiering station that we are talking about. One central printer would be my next choice. The only thing that can go wrong is that the printer hangs and the whole front counter is dead.
Don't share a printer between more than 2 lanes - the time it takes for the cashier to walk over to get the printout becomes too much. They also can easily mix up receipts at busy times.
When the printer runs out of paper, or toner or the drum, or what have you, they would panic, because the light would be blinking and they wouldnt know what to do (these guys really arent too bright and would always rather have the other guy fix the problem).
Write a 2-3 page instruction sheet on printer errors.
It will lead to a situation where the printer gets disabled at the unix level and has to be enabled (easy for you and me, but a mountain for these guys). Mind you all this is happening in a retail environment with customers waiting for receipts (ever been in a supermarket when the receipt printer jams - what if that was one printer for the whole market).
Modern receipt printer are getting better at this most thermals have a fairly straight paper path for the receipt roll. Best tactic if possible is to have a spare lane to move the customers across to.
This isnt good. The spooler is the obstacle that Im trying to avoid. I started to think of the cheapest, easiest, uncomplicated way to go about doing this. This is to continue doing the same thing that has worked flawlessly for about 15 years.
People often get quite sentimental about old computer systems, the faults become so ingrained the users can no longer see them, the users get molded to fit the system.
When talking about how good a system is always ask the new employees they have a better perspective on the relative merits.
The reason for going to laser is to eliminate preprinted forms, which saves substantial cash. I originally believed that the $99 laser I had did postscript. If it did, I would be golden. It doesnt. It does do PCL4. So, my next avenue to explore is to convert the postscript to PLC4 or convert the PDF being created directly to PCL4.
Postscript requires more memory than pcl, it used to be i think that they also paid a royalty to adobe. But those things are fading as memory is now very cheap and i think they use 3rd party emulations(ie like ghostscript) to rasterize the document.
I did a quick search on http://froogle.google.com/ there was a Brother Laser printer 1450N with postscript for a little over $200.
Network printers are also faster than slave printing with serial and perhaps parallel or usb. With network printers you can also quickly redirect the receipts to another lane if one printer stuffs up.
Currently, the preprinted forms/Epson arrangement is doing straight ascii printing. We have started using the Cross PDF package and we are converting everything to PDF. We are eliminating pre printed forms wherever they exist. If all of this ends up not working, then I will go with the spooled printer solution. Then I have to create a bunch of menu options to allow users to view the status of the spooler and printer - is lpd running, is the printer disabled, is there a lock file that needs to be cleaned up. I dont look forward to this. The dumb terminal cost about $350 w/kybd new. The laser Im considering is $99. The cheapest laser that does postscript (that I know of yet) is the hp 2100 about $400.
We use the hp1200N, not as cheap but fairy fast and reliable both of which imho are more important than the purchase price.
Im open to anything that is completely simple and cheap. I have brought up the idea of thermal printers like they use in Best Buy, etc... nobody likes em. We are a furniture store and the appearance of this just doesnt fit considering the average ticket is about $1500 and some substantially more. The owner likes something a little more elegant. So, now you know a little more about the environment what do you think ?
$1500 tickets being printed on a $100 laser? So if you print 50 tickets a day = $75000....so if your printer dies for a day cause you went for too cheap without a maintenance agreement or backup printer that has cost the company $75k in sales. I imagine cause each ticket is so large you are not printing a huge number the printer warmup time will be important....if you choose the wrong printer then each customer could be waiting an additional 10 seconds for the receipt.
If you main computer goes down your dumb terminals are history and you might have to close the store till it is fixed. If you replace with PC's which are cheaper than your dumb terminals you can run a local pc point of sale software in the event of your main machine failure.
Secondly printer running costs usually outflank the purchase price - try to work out the current running costs ink/paper/maintenance versus your proposal. Also try to add relative speeds in to the equation, if your new printer is faster try to work out how many more customers you can serve for each cashier.
ie 5 years ago we swapped from dot matrix receipt printers to thermals - if there was a line of 10 people the last person in line reached the cashier 1 minute earlier with a thermal printer.
- Robert ------- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
