Ship label / letter print

[jenlion]

Looking for a printer to do both shipping label printing AND regular printing.

Want to print thermal ship labels (UPS) and a standard letter printout from the same printer. Is there a printer that will do this? I've never seen thermal/sticker labels and regular toner-type printouts done from the same machine, but that's what I need to find. If it exists.

If it exists, it also needs to collate the printouts, but one step at a time.

Can anyone tell me if a combo thermal-label / laser printer exists?

Thanks!

 

[mrregan]

Why does it have to be thermal? You can buy toner made for labels (non smearing). Your print program would have to be able to select a form from a particular bin.

 

[jenlion]

Duh. Good point. All the UPS labels I've done have been on eltron/zebras... but if UPS will take something else, then I'm all for it. I'll check into that. Thanks mrregan.

Suggest a printer that will print 4x6 labels? I'm used to the rolls that go into said Eltrons, but not sure if/how that could work in another printer? (Or if UPS really cares that the labels are 4x6, as long as the printed area looks the same?) Totally open to suggestions, this one is new to me.

 

[mrregan]

I dont think you really even need actual labels. The ups software should print on regular paper just like the standard letter you wish to print. In that case any printer will work. I recieve a lot of packages with a ups label printed like this. If you must use labels, UPS software probably supports a couple of different kinds of sheet labels.

http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/shipping/help/create/labels/index.html

 

[jenlion]

Well, here's the actual issue.

We're not using WorldShip to print these labels. We're using a third-party software (StarShip) that integrates to our ERP software to create shipments, thousands of them.

Problem is that StarShip does not print shipping labels to anything but thermal printers. I had hoped that we could print them to 8.5x11 paper labels (wasteful, but helps with collation, and can do everything on the same printer). But they simply don't support anything but the zebra/eltron types.

Trying to figure out if there's some way to emulate one of these thermal printers to get the output to a "regular" paper.

Other option is to share the data with WorldShip -- but then we don't get our OTHER docs printed to collate at the same time.

Chickens and eggs, chickens and eggs.