ZEBRA ZT230 4-inch Thermal Printer

Where to begin. Let me start with the fact that it took me 3 days to get this printer functioning properly. 3 business days for an IT engineer is detrimental to our business. Even worse, it was 3 days our printing department couldn’t print tags. We bought this newer model to replace the ever unreliable, always a problem Z4M printer they were using because it just had ribbon errors for several years and needed some kind of maintenance once a week. That’s something you can bank on with any of Zebra’s thermal transfer printers. You will constantly have ribbon in, ribbon out, or paper out errors from day one until the day you finally get rid of it or smash it with a hammer. Whichever comes first.

Next, let’s talk about documentation. I hope you can decipher their text free pictograms because that’s all you’re getting. Having a problem with a stock that’s not a common gapped label? Good luck figuring that out because you’ll never see so much as an FAQ suggestion for those issues. Oh, and if you’re in one of their manuals, you’ll see some codes to send to the printer. Because that’s how you change settings on this if you want to succeed because the Web GUI, Driver Settings, and anything with an interface sucks and can’t be relied on to work. You have to send commands to the printers and then you’ll have at least a 50% chance it will do what you want. But anyway, don’t trust the codes. They are frequently typed wrong or incomplete. I fooled around with this new printer following their instructions to no success only to find out from a youtube video that they left off an argument () at the end that was required but not shown in their documentation. Duh, can’t believe I didn’t know that one.

Software. Yeah, have fun. I can’t even talk about how bad their drivers and software are because my blood pressure will rise.

Last but not least, Tech Support. Zebra’s techs make Time Warner / Spectrum techs look like gurus. They will tell you the wrong thing and not listen to anything you say by email and phone. You have to email them a dozen times to even get them on the phone. Then you will go exactly nowhere from there. For instance, my call with the tech yesterday went like this. Tech: “Try the manual calibration to scan the liner by removing a couple labels.”. Me: “As I said in this conversation and several emails, we’re using a tear off tag stock with side notches. Not labels. No adhesive. No liner. Just plain perforated & notched paper.”. Tech: “Oh, okay. In that case, let’s move the sensor to the middle to scan the gaps between labels.”. Me: “Again, these aren’t labels. There are no gaps. There is no liner. There is no adhesive. These are NOT labels.”. This went on and on for another 10 minutes or so before I demanded a next tier tech. The next tech did not call, just sent me an email saying I needed to do a manual calibration to read the liner and gaps between the labels. At this point, I gave up and went at it by myself again. After hours of struggling, it turns out the firmware needed updated so I did that. Then basically did the opposite of everything I was advised to do and got it to work. They told me to use the transmissive sensor. Changing that to reflective worked. So updating the firmware and messing with every setting possible eventually fixed the problem. Can’t wait until it starts getting errors again in a week like all Zebra printers do so I can do it all over again. I swear, 10% of my work week in IT is dealing with these hunks of junk. We have several because we are required to by customer specs and for their integration with UPS and FedEx software so we’re stuck with them. Otherwise, I’d have chucked all of them in a dumpster where they belong years ago.