Let’s Get Mobile, Part 1: Microcom Corp 428TC Plus Compact Ticket Printer

I can’t remember the last time the general design of the ticket printer changed. Ticket printers have always been these massive metal boxes that come with a huge footprint.

Let’s take a look at the inside of the standard ticket printer:



See the area highlighted in the black box? That is the actual printing mechanism; it really only makes up about 25% of the printer itself. So, what would happen if you got rid of all that extra space? You’d end up with something like the Microcom Corp 428TC Plus compact ticket printer:



Here, the 428TC is dwarfed in size by my ever faithful Boca Lemur-S.



But good things come in small packages.

Here’s the 428TC sitting next to an Epson TM-T88V receipt printer; they’re very comparable in size.



So where does the stock go? Right into the back of the printer; no more having to find the key to open the side of the ticket printer, when it is time to reload stock:



Microcom Corp gets extra points for including almost every printer interface from the last 20 years

Here is a side shot with the 428TC plus (with ticket catch) sitting on top of a Practical Automation ETX series from 1997!



I’m going to review this on 4 points:

1. 
   
2. Build Quality
   
3. Setup
   
4. Speed
   
5. Color
   

Build quality. Heavy enough that it isn’t going to wobble off your desk and small enough that you could carry it in a backpack for an offsite performance that you need to print tickets for; I never felt I had to be gentle with this printer.

Setup. Since I primarily used this ticket printer with Windows 8 tablets (Acer W700 and a Dell Latitude 10), I did have to download drivers from their website. I usually end up doing this anyways with other vendors and Microcom Corp was nice enough to provide a direct link to the files.

Note: The driver installation also installs a configuration program called MICOptions. I did have to go into this program and change one setting before the cutter would cut between tickets.



Speed. It is a few seconds slower than my Lemur-S and Datamax ST3306 but you are giving up some speed for size and I never felt like it was hung. I noticed no pauses between documents.

Color. Good, dark color. There were no problems reading any text and the ticket barcode scanned with both a wired barcode scanner and a mobile Bluetooth scanner, without issue.

I’ve had this printer for almost 6 months; I could have written a review of it not long after. But, the industry was on the verge of a POS hardware revolution, and I saw this printer as being part of that massive shift. In the next part of this series, we’ll look at the Windows 8 tablets I mentioned in this post. With one more post to look at just how mobile you can get with the Microcom Corp 428TC Compact Plus, a Windows 8 tablet and Altru. Think 4 wheels.