hello everyone this is colton with posguys.com and today we're going to be taking a look at the
te 200 300 line of barcode label printers uh the t series is tsc's entry level model of thermal
transfer label printer and both the te and 300 offer four inch wide thermal transfer printing
and for a four inch wide printer this unit comes in at a pretty competitive price when compared
to other printers on the market so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take a look under the
hood print out some labels and see if it uh stacks up so we'll start off with some basic specs here
there are two main models in the te200 series there's the te200 and the te300
the main difference between the two models is that the te200 prints at 203 dpi and clocks in
at six inches per second while the te 300 prints at 300 dpi uh and prints at five inches per second
both models can accept rolls of labels up to five inches in outer diameter
uh with a half inch or an inch uh on the inner diameter both models can print gap
labels black mark sensing media and fan fold media as well as continuous media
so there shouldn't be any issue with using just about any label that you might have to throw at it
uh i have the te200 here today so that's the one we're going to be taking a look at
all right so i've zoomed you in here so we can take a quick look at the inside of the unit before
we go into the print performance uh i've already taken the liberty of installing the media and
ribbon but if you wanted a quick tutorial on how to do uh that i've included a link to a video tsc
made in the blog post on our website and a link to that can be found in the description so we're
going to pop off the top here it's a clam shell design with two little clips um you can see the
internal components here um the labels are fed uh on the top here i'll lift it up and show you that
there and then by pushing this little green button on here it'll pop open the top uh the labels run
through here there's a nice little cog here that you can press to bring in the media clamps there
um and then of course the ribbon goes in on top here so if you snap that back on
um again i already installed the media so i won't show that but what i will show you how to
do is how to calibrate uh this printer because that's a request that we get a lot from people
wondering how to do that i'm doing it on this in particular because it's not the most
intuitive calibration process but it's relatively straightforward compared to others on the market
so uh you don't want to calibrate that you know anytime you're swapping out media ribbons anything
like that changing size so what you're going to want to do here is you're going to want to turn
off the unit there's a little switch in the back here it's on the bottom left right next
to the power cord uh you're going to turn that off you'll see that there's a little green light here
that turns off so what you're going to do is you're going to hold this power button here
or sorry the feed button here you're going to turn on the printer and it's going to go from a solid
green another thing that i wanted to highlight was how to move the printer between direct thermal and
thermal transfer printing since that's a pretty common request and as you know with supply chains
people are swapping out items um you know there's a good chance you're gonna be swapping this out
for a direct thermal only printer uh so in order to do that here you're going to click this little
button uh here the little window start key go to the settings menu here you're going to hit devices
and then go over to where you're going to see the te200 if you don't see this that means that
your printer isn't installed right we're going to right click on that sorry left click on that
go to manage hit printing preferences go over here to where it says graphics or sorry stock rather
and then under this method tab here you're going to see this little drop down
now right now it's set to use the current printer setting um but you can direct it to
either do direct thermal or thermal transfer just by hitting that uh and then hit apply
press ok and you're good to go so again it's pretty straightforward process
now that i've gone over that i just wanted to give a couple quick comments on my
impression of the unit overall um compared to some of its competitors on the market i feel
like the te200 has a slightly less premium build quality um that just it just feels like it's
a little less rugged and sturdy overall i see more plastic parts here while with some other
products they use a little more of a premium material and it just feels a little more stable um
that is certainly reflected in the cost of the printer like i said it's priced
pretty competitively and the thing to do is that i don't feel like the build quality
negatively impacts the actual printing performance we'll get into it a little bit but i think the
printer prints relatively well it's pretty in line with other things that are kind of in its class
it does print or sorry it does boast a two-year manufacturer warranty and a printhead life of a
million inches or 12 months whatever comes first and that's pretty in line with what others are
offering so there's some peace of mind there all right so now we're going to jump into the
printing here uh right now i have this loaded with some two by one thermal transfer labels
and i have a test label ready to print here on single bartender um i want to note that the
printer itself is going to ship with a version of seagull that will only work for tsd printers
so you know if you're just looking for something really quick to get you going
that's a pretty big convenience uh so right now like i said i have a little loaded tested
here a little bar code and a drawing just gonna hit down to hit that and print hit print there
see that pop out there um a nice cutter bar relatively simple um i'm gonna do a comparison
here i'm pulling this up on the screen uh i think that the lines on this are pretty crisp
and show up well especially for a 203 dpi printer i've compared this label here with one that i've
printed with a zd420 using the same labels and ribbon uh as you can see it's pretty identical
so i'd say it passes the princess for sure so pretty good value for your money overall
another thing that i wanted to talk about is printer compatibility uh you know supply chains
are all over the place right now and so people are looking for a printer that can kind of move in and
uh replace and be an alternative for lots of different things and
this printer definitely meets the bill it comes loaded with tscpl ezd printer language
but it can also emulate epl zpl in dpl printer languages basically what that means is that the
printer should be supported by any label printing software that would support a zebra printer
um i know those have been really hard to find uh lately so that makes this model a pretty
convenient alternative if you're having a hard time getting a hold of zeta printer
and with that uh we're gonna wrap up this video again that has been a review of the tsc te 200 300
um again i think it's a super affordable printer it's definitely getting good value for your money
and maybe even a little bit more than that um relatively easy to use and set up decent build
quality overall uh and definitely you wouldn't be a mess with going uh with this particular product
thank you so much for tuning in if you wanted to learn more you can go to the
blog post that's linked in the description below and if you had any questions or wanted to
get yourself one of these uh feel free to call our sales engineering team they can be reached at
the number on the screen now thank you so much everybody and have a great day