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Controlling your own printing destiny

February 9, 2011

When it comes to reproducing graphics or images on a kiosk print out, you basically have two options -- built-in printer language printers or host-based printers. Neither one is better than the other per se, but knowing the pros and cons will help you select the best option for your kiosk application.

Language-based printers use built-in processors and memory as well as printer languages. They perform therasterizationinside the printer with their own processors and control their own print heads and mechanisms.Host-based technology defers to the computer do all the processing before sending the image or document to the printer. A host-based printer will print exactly what the computer sends it whereas printers with built-in languages will get commands from the computer and will process the images themselves.

The primary advantage of host-based printers is lower cost because they don’t need their own processor or memory. The key take away is that host-based printers are dependent on the computer for their images and therefore the print speed.

Because of this, if the computer has a slower processor and the document to be printed contains complex graphics, host-based print time could potentially take longer than language-based. However, since most computers on the market today process at much faster speeds than most printer processors, host-based technology should allow faster print speeds than built-in language based printers especially when using a USB port. Typically USB ports enable faster printing compared to parallel ports. They also enable richer, more complex graphics versus language-based technology.

Since smaller kiosks take the least amount of sellable space away from retailers, they have a greater likelihood of deeper aisle penetration. And since a smaller kiosks requires a smaller printer, that should indicate more host-based printing in the future.