Best Industrial Label Printers - Offices, Factory Floor or startups

When you're considering your industrial label printer needs, you want reliability, performance and a cost-effective solution. At the higher end of the market, printers are a serious budget consideration and require plenty of planning and research into finding the right industrial printer for your business. Whether you're considering a printer for your office, factory floor or one for your new startup business, this guide will take an in-depth look into all the factors you should consider.

Industrial Printers

Industrial Label Printers

Types of Industrial Printers
Considerations for your Industrial Label Printer
The Best Industrial Label Printers

Finding the best Industrial label printers can sometimes be a bit of a headache at times. There's many different types of printers with varying confusing degrees of technology. From Laser to Thermal Transfer, the type of printer you are after should be based on your business requirements (obviously) but also your budget. A high-end industrial printer that can produce thermal transfer and direct thermal labels will set you back a pretty penny, so you want to make absolutely sure what you're buying will improve productivity, isn't cheaply made and can produce enough labels for your business.

Of course, for business these costs need to outset the benefit you're going to be getting from your printer. Buying an asset like an industrial label printer may pay-off in the long term, but if you're after short-term solutions, you could also consider budgeting to loan a printer from another company, especially if your business is seasonal and operations don't require too much logistics to borrow these machines. These days Industrial label printers are quite portable and can connect to most networks via WiFi or Ethernet.

That being said, let's look at the different types of industrial label printers that are available on the market today.

Types of Industrial Printers

Thermal Printers

Thermal Printers usually use two different types of printing technology: Direct Thermal and Thermal Transfer. These types of printers don't use ink, but rather heat. On the smallest scale, you can get single machines for less than $100, but on an industry scale they can go easily above $5000. Printronix is one well-known maker of these types of printers, providing monochrome output and energy star power efficiency machines. They produce monochrome labels, so if you need color on your labels you'll want an Laser or Ink jet printer.

Laser Printer

Laser printers are very common and a simple one can be picked up for less than $30. In fact, in some cases it's cheaper to buy a brand new laser jet printer than buying additional ink cartridges to refill them. Office Laser printers are designed for multiple persons in busy offices. HP produce LaserJet series, with some of these enterprise printers supporting up to 25 people.

Inkjet Printers

Inkjet is the most common type of printer in the world. They work by propelling ink droplets to create digitial images on paper, plastic or other printing materials. They have a wide range of pricing options, from super cheap to industry scale levels. The difference is generally down to resolution, printing capacity, speed and size.

MFP (Multi-functional Printers)

MFPs are multi-functional printers that serve as both a printer, scanner, copier, faxer and many other functionalities that businesses may require. They are generally found in business offices but you can also get home-office MFPs that are inexpensive and easy to run.

Considerations for your Industrial Label Printer

When you are considering buying a printer for your business, you need to take into consideration a few important points.

Scale Of Operations - Is your business going to need a printer that can produce up to 5,000 labels a second? Does it need to print labels and barcodes round the clock? Or do you just need a simple machine to print your labels only on a Friday afternoon when stock arrives? This type of question will impact your decision on the type of printer you need.
Printing Resolution - How detailed do your prints need to be? Printers use DPI for resolution measurement, with 200 being a common standard these days. Presenting to clients full-detailed images can mean the difference between a lost sale and a new contract.
Network Availability - If your office has it's own WAN, you'll probably want to have the printer connected to it too. Make sure the printer can connect to your network- most printers these days come with ethernet ports anyway but you may also want to consider WiFi based devices too.
Performance - If you go too cheap on a printer, it'll need more maintenace. Some of the higher-end models have optimized the process of performance by adding features such as preventative nozzle clogging, servicing routines and more. These features can help save you costs down the road and prevent disruption to your workflow.
Energy Efficient - On the factory floor, printing on some of the older machines can use a lot of electricity and drive up bills, especially if they are in constant use. Today, printers can come with energy efficient features to help prevent wastage.

The Best Industrial Label Printers

Check out this list of industrial label printers we have curated, each with different features, performance and pricing. Remember to consider the above points before making a purchase and let us know in the comments what worked for your setup and how you got on.

Printer	DPI	Technology	Network	Print Speed	Purchase
Sato WWCL00081 Series CL4NX High Performance Thermal Printer	203	Thermal Printer	Serial/Parallel/Ethernet/USB/BLUETOOTH/WLAN Interface	10 ips	Buy On Amazon
Zebra Technologies ZT41046-T010000Z Series ZT410	600 dpi	Thermal Transfer/Direct Thermal	USB 2.0/RS-232 Serial/10/100 Ethernet, Bluetooth 2.1	N/A	Buy On Amazon
Zebra - ZD500t Thermal Transfer Desktop Printer for Labels and Barcodes	300 dpi	Thermal	Wifi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, Parallel, Serial, USB	Prints 6 in/sec	Buy On Amazon
BradyJet J5000 Industrial InkJet Color Label Printer	4800 dpi	Inkjet	USB , Ethernet	15cm per second	Buy On Amazon
Printronix T82X6-1110-0 Printronix T82X6 Thermal Transfer Printer	203 dpi	thermal	wifi	N/A	Buy On Amazon
Brady i7100 600dpi Industrial Label Printer Peel Model	600 dpi	Thermal Transfer	usb, ethernet, RS232C, I/O ports	300 mm/sec print speed	Buy On Amazon
Intermec PM43c Direct Thermal/Thermal Transfer Printer	406 dpi	Direct Thermal/Thermal Transfer	USB - Serial - Ethernet	12 in/s	Buy On Amazon
TSC 99-051A003-70LF Industrial Thermal Transfer	600 dpi	Thermal Transfer	Parallel, USB Host, Serial, USB, Ethernet	6	Buy On Amazon