is there a piece of commercial or industrial equipment you've always wanted to own
not because you have some practical purpose to use it for but just because you've never
been allowed to get up close to one and see how it's made how it works and what it's like to use
for example a fire alarm pull station or a street light or one of those two-way radios that makes
that squawk noise when you key up the mic that's why when i saw three of these receipt printers
on the shelf at the thrift store i couldn't resist buying one of them even though i have no use at
all for it this is a samsung bixolon thermal receipt printer it did come with the paper
it takes quite a bit of effort to pop it open but there you can see the roll of thermal paper
which pops out quite easily because there's no spool holding in place that's the drop
in loading feature they advertise because you know once in a while you buy something or you
make an order at a restaurant and when they go to print out your receipt the printer is out of paper
so you see them take out the old empty roll and put in the new roll of paper so for the first time
in my life i can do that myself here and tear off the excess and there we go it's reloaded
and i did get it with the power supply it's a 24 volt dc power supply i didn't think these ran on
such a high voltage i was wondering if these are parallel or serial but this one is serial i know
some of the really new ones are usb but this is an older model obviously it's got an on off
switch on the back and that's where the power plugs in there's the information sticker on the
bottom bixolon i assume that's how you pronounce that samsung mini printers thermal printer model
stp-103pg 24 volts at one amp center positive has a whole bunch of dip switches for configuring the
baud rate of the serial port you can set the density to dark or normal handshaking
for the serial port and you can select 24 or 32 characters per line although it
says reserved so i don't know if that works on this model and you can select english or korean
and there it was made in korea and i checked those dip switch settings according to this
chart and this one was configured for 9600 bits per second it's set to normal density
xon/xoff handshaking 32 characters per line in english and it looks like nobody ever peeled off
the protective film on this logo although it's so old i don't know if i'll be able to get it off in
one piece and this feels like a rather cheap label anyway i mean this one is just obviously a label
stuck on the front so i don't know if samsung even makes these or they just stick their name on it
so for what it's worth that's that protective film taken off and now it's all sticky so i
probably should just left that on i have it plugged into power now and even without it
connected to a computer we should be able to do some kind of test print on this so turn it on and
i think you have to take it offline before you feed the paper that doesn't literally mean online
as in on the internet that just means on the line going to the computer that's telling it what to
print and when you take it offline then it ignores whatever the computer is sending to it so right
now it's offline that's why the power light is blinking and we should be able to feed the paper
yes we can i don't know if this can automatically cut the paper
a lot of these can but this may be one of the cheaper models where you just have to
yank on it like that and then put it back online and now it's ready to print
but we should be able to do some kind of test print if we hold down one of these buttons
while we turn it on so hold down the feed button while turning on and there it goes that was...
oh it's still doing... it's still doing the
test print... "self-test printing please press paper feed button"
so it keeps going completed okay i was a little too early trying to yank that off
so there's the complete test print stp-103 version 1.25 there's the settings it's set to
parallel interface so can this do parallel as well as serial i don't know
15k buffer there are the dip switch settings there is where i tried to tear it off
there is a complete ascii character set or at least part of it this only goes up to o
and some of the special characters it can do
and completed now let me try holding out the online button while i turn it on
it's doing like a density test
that' like a barcode i can actually feel it's warm coming out because this is a thermal
printer obviously so it does use heat to print the paper i could... but i was holding my hand there
i could feel it warming up as it was printing so there's the various densities i don't know
if that's because the print head is dirty or if this is just old paper it could be either one
now let's try hooking this up to a computer and see if we can print something on it
the dip switches lied this is not a serial printer or at least it's not configured that way because i
tried all these different cables and adapters connecting it to the serial port and i could
not get it to print anything even when i had it set to the correct baud rate but then i tried
plugging it into the parallel port of this tandy wp-2 and now when i type the command to print
bingo it prints the line wrapping is all wrong but it's clearly printing what i typed into the wp-2
and you have to tear this off pretty quickly otherwise you get a very ragged edge on it
so you have to really yank on it like like that and even that wasn't that great look at that so
let's try that again there we go now i have it connected to my thinkpad x61 which is my newest
pc that still has a parallel port i'm sure it would work with a usb to parallel adapter
but the problem is most of these have a centronics connector on them which is obviously not going to
work with this it needs a db25 connector bixlon still has the stp-103 listed on their web site
they say the printer was discontinued in november 2011 and service and support for it
was discontinued in november 2016 and they still have the driver for it it's for windows xp through
windows 10 both 32 and 64 bit now i'm installing the driver in windows so i'll choose lpt1
and the documentation that comes with it mentions that it will give you this error
message that has not passed windows logo testing but it tells you to just choose continue anyway
and you have to restart your computer
i don't know if it's actually recording in the video like that but i'm seeing a pretty trippy
moire pattern on my camera's viewfinder right now anyway under printers and faxes i now have bixolon
stp-131 so i'll set that as my default printer and let's try to do a test page
all right that was the test page that windows logo doesn't look so hot but what do you expect from a
receipt printer and here we go let's see if this thing has a paper cutter in it so i'll do receipt
partial cut so now is it going to cut the paper when i do the test page
nope it doesn't seem like it has a paper cutter
that's too bad now let me try printing a picture it's a diagram of a keyboard layout
hey that's not too bad got kind of cut off at the top there but
it's readable so there's the original image compared to the printout so i did a pretty good
job of printing out those colors in and halftones obviously the resolution isn't very good but
for a receipt printer that's perfectly fine
so if you're a cashier that's one way to amuse your co-workers misappropriate the company's
receipt printers to print tiny low quality black and white copies of risque photos who
says there's nothing good on tv anymore there's a better look at the thermal print head and that's
the part that nobody ever cleans so you often get receipts to have huge chunks of pixels missing and
big streaks going down them because the printhead is clogged up with dirt and nobody ever cleans it
there's one more trick you can do with thermal paper use a lighter to turn it black with the
heat of the flame you don't actually light it on fire you just hold it close
and you can see it starting to turn the paper black from the heat of the flame
and that's not from burning the paper you can see it's still
white on the other side although it did singe it a little bit there
that's just the heat of the flame activating the thermal ink inside the paper and acetone
erases the thermal ink so here's what happens when you dab some nail polish remover on it
so this video has pretty much come full circle i finally got my hands on something i've always
been curious about but now that i have it and i've tried it and it works what am i going to
use it for making fake receipts to return items i didn't buy "gee i don't know why the barcode
isn't scanning can't you at least give me a store credit?" and in case it wasn't obvious...