News

Swecoin launches media for thermal ticket printers

October 21, 2003

Middletown, R.I. -- Swecoin US Inc., designer of small footprint thermal kiosk printers has certified a new thermal media that will revolutionize the way paper is used in all thermal ticket printing.

Sharkskin is a waterproof and tear-resistant thermal media that will last longer than any thermal ticket media available on the market today, according to a news release.

The new polypropylene Sharkskin media was tested and certified for a major themed-based amusement park located in the Midwestern part of the United States. The park has deployed Swecoin's thermal ticket printer/encoder machine (TTPM2) to print out ticket access passes to the various park attractions and currently has 50 thermal ticket printers installed.

"We are very excited about this new thermal media as we believe it will truly revolutionize how we print tickets in the future," said Norman Armstrong, senior product engineer at Swecoin US Inc.

"We put this media through a very in-depth testing process. I even carried a printed, magnetically encoded ticket for 11 days and put it through the rigors of everyday life, and the data encrypted on the magstripe side and the bar code printed on the thermal side were read as easily as if it were a new ticket. It's the first and only of its kind."

In partnership with Graphic Controls, the Sharkskin media has been tested and certified for use in thermal ticket printing for at least 40,000 cuts. It supports bar coding and magnetic encoding and will last at least 10 times longer than the traditional thermal ticket media, the release said.

Sharkskin media is also denser than traditional ticket media and provides bolder, crisper images.

Swecoin TTPM 2 is a combined magnetic card encoder and thermal printer that encodes information on a magnetic stripe on one side and prints graphics, barcodes and text on the thermal side of the card. The TTPM2 has a built-in cutter for ticket separation and can print bitmap graphics and bar codes.

Printed text can be oriented in 90-degree steps, and print data can be separated into fixed and variable fields for optimized throughput. The TTPM 2 is commonly used in transportation, parking and access control applications and is an ideal solution for fast, reliable ticketing using bar codes or magnetic stripes as information carriers.

Swecoin thermal kiosk printers are used in unattended applications, including receipt printing, coupons, HR applications, and general Internet/Web site access. The release said the vendor has more than 150,000 installations worldwide.