Why You Should Be Buying Certified Supplies for Your Zebra Printers

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One of the biggest pain points when it comes to printing barcode labels is the cost of printing supplies and labels.

When you’re printing hundreds or thousands of labels, the costs can easily add up. In fact, companies typically spend 3 to 10 times more on print media and supplies than they do on the original cost of their printers—just in a single year!

The common response is to cut costs by buying cheaper supplies. Over our many years of providing barcoding solutions and printing supplies, we’ve seen many customers choose this strategy. But we always recommend against it because it usually turns out to cost them more over the long haul.

Buying cheaper supplies might sound like a good idea to save money, but it often leads to the exact opposite. Cheap supplies are usually much lower in quality, and they’re made with inconsistent and substandard materials that cause printing issues, disruptions to labeling processes, and costly printhead replacements.

For example, supplies with poor coating can be abrasive and grate on your printhead, causing premature wear that requires replacements that often costs hundreds of dollars.

There’s also the potential issue of cheap labels that transfer preprinted colors to your printhead and cause print quality problems. Every time you have to reprint your labels, you’re spending more time and money.

Lower quality labels may also be too heat sensitive and require constant print darkness adjustments to compensate for printing problems and barcode scanning issues. More print darkness means you’ll be burning through your printing supplies faster.

Adhesives are frequently a problem as well since cheap labels with the wrong adhesive may cause labels to fall off. In other cases, low-quality labels ooze adhesive into your printer because the label rolls are often wound too tight. This can cause frequent printer jams or result in labels wrapping around the platen and adhesive oozing onto the label liner.

To add to these headaches, if you choose cheap labels and ribbons that aren’t properly designed and matched for the precise conditions of your labeling and scanning environment, you can end up with your barcodes and label information fading, getting damaged, or rubbing away.

This is why our barcoding experts at AbeTech always recommend high-quality and certified Zebra printing supplies for all Zebra label printers.

Why Certified Zebra Supplies Are Better

Zebra’s barcode labels and printing supplies provide consistent quality and performance across all labeling applications, and they typically save you considerable time and money in the long run.

Zebra uses consistent materials and has ISO 9001:2008-certified processes in place to ensure the highest label quality and print performance. These quality processes include comprehensive measures to ensure Zebra-certified supplies are superior:

  • Pretesting on Zebra printers
  • Assessment of printhead wear
  • Verification of adhesive strength
  • Pretests for environmental factors
  • Testing for indoor/outdoor use and high/low temperatures
  • Testing for resistance to abrasion, moisture, and chemical exposure.

The end result is that you get better quality supplies with the right materials for each Zebra printer and application. You get the best possible printing, labeling, and scanning results with minimal printhead wear and none of the problems of cheap, low-quality substitutes.

Best of all, if you own Zebra industrial or desktop printers and agree to use genuine Zebra supplies exclusively, Zebra will cover the cost of any printhead if it ever needs to be replaced. That alone could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars on your printing costs.

To learn more about Zebra supplies and request samples and pricing, contact our team at AbeTech for more information.

 

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