If You Have A Datamax I-4308; This Printhead Is For You.

Disclaimer: This review is not about Thermal Label Printers; it is a bout a printhead for one such machine. To keep this review on track I will not be going into much detail about Thermal Label Printers.

I work in an industry where I come into contact with what are called Thermal Label Printers. Thermal Labe Printers can be found almost everywhere. Hospitals use them to produce labels for lab test and for other hospital needs. Movie tickets are printed in them. Shipping Departments of companies us them for producing shipping labels. Ski resorts use them to print lift tickets. These are only a few uses of a printer of this nature. The short Explanation of what a Thermal Label Printer is: a specialized printer that is designed to print on rolls of labels using heat to produce the print. The way it works is that you put a roll of labels into the unit. When you are printing the labels come out the front of the unit with print on them. Some labels have chemicals that react to heat. Others need what is called ribbon to make them print. Either way, heat is used to produce the print. The heat needed to produce the print comes from a part called a printhead. Without a printhead in these printers, there would be no source of heat to create the print. One such printhead is the Printhead for the Datamax I-4308 Printer.

The Datamax I-4308 Printhead is unique to the Datamax I-4308 Printer. The Printhead has a printing area of four inches in width. It prints at a resolution of 300 DPI (dots per inch). The Manu factor’s suggested price is $695. The Warranty on it is either one year or one million linear inches (one inch of label material ran is one linear inch), which ever comes first.

This printhead is only designed to work in the I-4308 printer. It is composed of a metal plate on which we will find several items. A flat metal side is the top of the printhead. It has several holes: two for aligning when placing it into the printer, a third whole is threaded for mounting it into the printer. The bottom side has a green circuit board like part. Spanning the width of this board is a think black line. Within this line is an even smaller line that is very hard to see with an unaided eye (it is less than a 64th of an inch thick). This is the printing element. This element has 300 little heating elements (really called diodes), per inch, on it. On the back of the printhead are two connector ports. One is white and is for the power cable that connects to the printhead. The other is black and is for the data to cable to be connected to the printhead. That is pretty much the printhead; the picture above is wrong; that is NOT a printhead for an I-4308 printer (Trust me, I have been dealing with Datamax printers for a long time. The printehad above is for an older style Datamax printer).

The way this printhead works is relativity simple. To keep things simple, the printer is commanded by a computer with label design software on it. The program sends a signal to the printer to start printing. When this happens, your labels start to come out the front of the printer. While the labels are being fed out of the printer, the heating element heats and cools (in specified time intervals and at different points on the heating elements). This is what produces the print to appear on the label.

Caring for the printhead is very important. You should always follow the manufactor’s recommendation. Failure to do so can void warranty. Clean it as directed by the printer’s operators manual and NEVER EVER take a sharp object to It.; scratching the printhead will void the warranty. Failure to care for the printhead will cause the heating elements to burn out. When the do, vertical, blank lines (voids in the printed area) will appear on you label. The only way to correct for this is by purchasing a new printhead.

Overall, I have had a lot of good experiences with the I-4308 printheads. I rarely ever see a defective one. If cared for properly they can last well over the warranty period. I have seen some that have lasted as long as 7 years before needing to be replaced. Other printheads, that aren’t cared for, can burn out within months. It can be frustrating when this happens but it usually it is due to neglect. If a printhead goes bad, no fault of the user, the manufacturer will replace it at any charge (after they evaluate it and come to this conclusion). Being that the I-4308 printhead is a specialized product I can’t truly say that you should go out and buy one of these printheads. If you don’t have an I-4308 Printer, what are you going to do with this product? What I can say is that if you have an I-4308 printer and has a choice of purchasing this original manufacture printhead over an after market printhead; buy the original manufacturer’s printhead. It may cost more but in the end you will be happier with piece of mind.

Thank you for reading
Brett

Note: using a third party printhead will void the warranty on the printer. That is if you are still covered under the warranty. If you are still covered under the warranty, contact your local dealer for printhead information. Also, this review was written with the assumption that the labels were loaded and threaded into the printer properly. Again, this review was not about the printer.