You would never want your point of sale system to be down because you ran out of paper. Receipt and remote printers are the parts of your point of sale system most prone to failure. We are not suggesting that you have a warehouse full of backup printers, but we are suggesting that you can almost eliminate your downtime by having a single backup printer for your business. This is also true for why buy all in one printers. Receipt printers come in a wide variety of interfaces, but parallel interfaces are a great choice for receipt printers. Follow the money.
What this means for you is less cost of repairs but a longer down time. Which is similar to what to look for in an all in one printer most of the time. Both Canon and Hewlett-Packard have been involved in lawsuits over both cartridges and alleged unfair competition. Parallel printer connections are newer technology than serial interfaces.
For this reason, if you only bought a single backup printer for a point of sale system that had both thermal and dot matrix printers it would probably be a dot matrix printer. In 2005, Lexmark won a suit that gives the company the authority under patent and contract law to enforce the “single use only” policy that’s written on the boxes in which their cartridges are packaged. That makes them difficult to use as remote printers since those runs require distances of 100′ – 300′ feet from the connection point.
The price of printers are coming down along with the cost of other computer peripherals. Those buying printer ink cartridges in the UK and elsewhere are advised to investigate the policies surrounding the reuse or refill of these indispensable items before engaging in this practice. Usually this is the exact opposite of what to look for in an all in one printer. It is the unique and easy locking parallel cable connector that makes a parallel receipt printer the perfect choice.
Downtime is reduced from hours or days to a matter of minutes. As always, check with your point of sale software vendor to make sure that they support parallel receipt printers.