Overcoming the Pitfalls Associated with Thermal Printing with Epson C6000 Series Color Inkjet Label Printers Printers

Direct thermal and thermal transfer printers are the industry standard label printing solutions in large and small businesses. After all, thermal printing technology is fast, flexible, and reliable. It’s been the go-to solution for years. However, thermal transfer printers are monochrome printers, which is fine for barcodes and secondary labels, but rather dull for marketing purposes.

Color labels help brands distinguish themselves, convey their identities, and appeal to their markets. Traditionally, businesses have ordered preprinted color labels from print service providers, leaving white space on the label designs for a second print run through thermal printers. This allows businesses to get the best of both worlds, appealing full color labels with printed barcodes, lot numbers, expiration dates, and other types of variable data. But it also adds complexity to the label printing process.

For example:

-Print service providers typically have long lead times and minimum order requirements, meaning you must order large quantities of labels in advance.

-You may never use all of the labels you order, resulting in waste and unnecessary costs.

-You must actively manage your label inventory lest you run out.

-If you must modify your label design due to a change in ingredients, product specifications, regulations, branding, or anything else, you must place a large new order (at whatever quantity the print service provider requires), wait for production, and discard your old labels.

-You must run your preprinted labels through your thermal transfer printers in order to print secondary and/or variable information such as barcodes, expiration dates, manufacturing codes, and so forth.

In addition, marketing trends have changed over the years, with an emphasis on greater segmentation. As businesses cater to specialized niches and local markets, they tend to require a series of smaller batches of individual labels. For example, you might have a single product that’s marketed to five different market segments. Rather than a single label design with its minimum order requirements, you now have five label designs to print and manage, each with their own minimum order requirements.

The old way of ordering preprinted labels and running them through direct thermal or thermal transfer printers still gets the job done, but it’s far from efficient. Minimum order quantities increase the cost per label and result in wasted label inventory; it’s nearly impossible to change label designs as needed without discarding preprinted labels; and it’s impractical to take advantage of localized and custom marketing opportunities.

Fortunately, there’s a better way thanks to the arrival of Epson’s new C6000 series color inkjet label printers. The Epson ColorWorks C6000A, C6000P, C6500A, and C6500P color label printers are designed to replace thermal label printers and eliminate the need for preprinted inventory. Instead, color and variable data are printed simultaneously in a single print run using Epson PrecisionCore serial printheads and Epson UltraChrome DL pigment ink.

As a result, you can print durable, full color labels on demand, in-house without concerns about minimum order quantities, lead times and delays, and label inventory management. If you must change the label design, you can do so immediately without wasting labels. If you cater to multiple markets or want to create seasonal labels, you can do so easily.

Epson ColorWorks C6000 series label printers are fast, high resolution, color label printers. They are highly scaleable and can be added to a fleet of thermal printers seamlessly thanks to ZPL II compatibility, remote printer management, and integration with SAP and other enterprise applications.

There are four models in the ColorWorks C6000 series:

-ColorWorks C6000A - 4-inch model with auto cutter

-ColorWorks C6000P - 4-inch model with peeler

-ColorWorks C6500A - 8-inch model with auto cutter

-ColorWorks C6500P - 8-inch model with peeler

All of the ColorWorks C6000 series color label printers are comparable in features and price to the industrial thermal printers currently in use today, but with the addition of full color printing.

The challenges of thermal label printing can now be overcome by adding Epson ColorWorks C6000 and C6500 color labels to your fleet. Contact us today to find out about doing large scale deployments with the new Epson ColorWorks C6000 series printers.