Point of Sale Printers

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POS receipt printers and other point of sale printers and equipment choices abound and it can make it hard for you to decide the best option for you. If you are at the beginning of your search for a POS printer you might even be wondering what POS stands for. POS stands for point of sale, which is the point when a customer is buying a product or service from you and is ready to pay.

Why might you need point of sale printers or systems? POS systems and printers allow you to keep track of your transactions, provide facts about tracking sales results, and also allow you to better serve your customer through accurate transactions and receipts that might or might not include other information such as coupons, contact information, and other sales promotion tools.

A point of sale printer is just one element of a POS system that can allow you to efficiently and effectively manage your business including inventory and ordering. You can attach pos printers to a PC, depending on your needs, with several options to customize the point of sale printer and system to meet your business needs.

What other equipment comprises a POS system? Besides a point of sale printer you will also need a computer, cash drawer, barcode scanner, receipt printer, programmable keyboard or touch screen, and the appropriate POS software and applications. You can also look into options such as POS displays, point of sale printer accessories, specialty printers, panel mount thermal receipt printers and cash register supplies.

A receipt printer that works with your POS system is a very necessary component. You can attach it directly to your cash drawer and you have such options to choose from as thermal printers, impact printers, automatic paper cutters, parallel or serial ports, printer speed options as well as printer resolution options.

The most important features to consider before purchasing your point of sale printer is the resolution (which is determined by the DPI or dots per inch, the higher the number the higher the resolution), the print speed, (a major consideration for the convenience of your customers), the paper width, and how much printing you will be doing.

The two main choices are a dot-matrix receipt printer and a thermal receipt printer. The first are very reliable and have low operating costs although they are noisier than thermal printers. The latter use special heat sensitive ribbons or paper, create images instead of dots, print faster and are quieter and have fewer moving components. Thermal printers are more expensive to operate due to the special ribbons and they cannot print on multi-part forms.