You would never want your point of sale system to be down because you ran out of paper. Receipt and remote printers are the parts of your point of sale system most prone to failure. They get the most use and have the most wear and tear of any part of your system. Of course this is not the same as printers in any case. Receipt printers come in a wide variety of interfaces, but parallel interfaces are a great choice for receipt printers. The real profit for printer makers, however, lies in the sale of printer cartridges.
In many cases the local dealer will offer you a loaner program. This is not like cheap HP printers for sale, even thought this is a common misconception. Virtually every major printer manufacturer has been involved in lawsuits regarding the sale and use of re-manufactured inkjet or laser printer ink cartridges.
This makes buying a replacement printer extremely simple. Those who fail to return them are breaking the law and could face legal action if they refill a cartridge, send it to a third-party refiller or simply do not return it to Lexmark. That makes them difficult to use as remote printers since those runs require distances of 100′ – 300′ feet from the connection point.
You keep other supplies in your operation and you should consider keeping a backup printer as well. Shawn is presently working with TONIK – a mass provider of Inks and Toners. Which can be similar to cheap printers in some instances. These are very important factors with regard to a point of sale receipt printer.
In the time it takes to call your service provider you could have already exchanged the broken printer and be back up servicing your customers. As always, check with your point of sale software vendor to make sure that they support parallel receipt printers.