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  

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...