Portable Thermal Printer,KINGEAR Mini Wireless Bluetooth High Speed Direct Thermal Printer Compatible with ESC/POS/STAR Print Commands Set

The intention of this printer is to be attached to a point-of-sale terminal, to print receipts and similar things. As such, it would be expected that a POS application would be used - that is, something that knows about the thermal paper format and doesn’t try to use it as an A4 photo inkjet.Nevertheless, I have acquired this for other purposes: printing cheap and disposable shopping lists, reminders and the odd sticky label. Currently I use Google’s Keep for shopping lists and similar, but dragging the phone out to check the list every few minutes is risking a drop catastrophe, not to mention the thing being nicked or lost, so my hope is that receipt-type printout solves all that because it’s quick, always available and it costs basically nothing if you lose it. To that end, this printer looked ideal in that it is portable and has Bluetooth capabilities (maybe I could print off the list in the car just before entering the supermarket...).The printer has an impressive collection of communications methods: USB, Bluetooth and the humble serial port. Lacking a cable (the connector for serial is a mini-USB type and I had no pinout info) I was unable to test the serial capabilities, but I have no doubt that it works well given suitable wires (of which only GND and TXD are really needed).My ideal would be to use Bluetooth for both the phone and PC to keep things simple, but in the end I wound up using USB for the PC - my Bluetooth setup would connect to the printer but wouldn’t assign a com port, so couldn’t actually talk to it.Drivers for various OSes are supplied on a CD. The Windows one is pretty necessary since you can’t see the printer /as/ a printer without the driver. There is a setup application which installs the driver and adds a printer shortcut. Tip: only run this once and if you can’t see the printer’s port (USB or Bluetooth) at that time, pick an unused one and modify it in the driver later.I had a bit of trouble because of the aforementioned Bluetooth issue, but eventually I sorted it out so the printer appeared on USB. At this point one is tempted to hit the ‘print a test page’ option in the Windows printer properties page - don’t, unless you want to see the entire roll of thermal paper on the floor! The driver defaults to paper size of 58mm x 3276mm. Yes, that’s a 3m long page, which is going to be ejected after printing... Change it to 210mm and also select the option “do not print blank space at page end”. After that, providing your program doesn’t print page numbers at the bottom of each page, you’ll get just the actual print.For Android, there is a printing app on the CD, but this turns out to be just a demo and every time you run it and connect to the printer it prints a welcome message. Useful for checking that the printer is accessible from Android, and the source to the app is provided should you want to roll your own.However, since this printer uses the same commands as many other receipt printers, there are lots of third-party printing apps on the Play store. It took only a couple of minutes to select one, install it, and then printing from Google Keep (my original aim, remember) is a matter of selecting ‘Send’ from the hamburger menu and then selecting whichever printing app you installed. Perfect printout every time, no paper on the floor, and the same process works with most Android apps.So far it is looking good - nicely built and capable, works without fuss. But things can’t be perfect and there must be some downsides...The most obvious is that an external PSU is required for charging, whereas charging via the USB cable would have been nice. But considering that the printer is meant to be portable, which lead is used for charging is largely academic.Next, the use of a mini-USB socket for both USB and serial ports could lead to tears, and also means creating a serial lead isn’t that simple. However, since hardly anything comes with serial ports nowadays this also is just something to note in passing.The manual is quite good considering some of the ones you get nowadays, but since it covers several models the LED names referred to don’t match the names on this particular model. It also doesn’t tell you how to open the printer - you’d think this would be obvious, but the latch offers sufficient resistance that without the explicit instruction you might think you’re doing it wrong. On the plus side, once you do bite the bullet and get it open, you can see that it is actually quite robust and there is nothing to worry about.One puzzling aspect is that this, and similar, printers are called ‘58mm thermal printer’ yet if you look for 58mm paper there is hardly any. The trick is to search for 57mm paper, of which there is literally reams of the stuff.Overall I am pleased with this printer. For use with a phone it is pretty much a no-brainer to get it going, whilst on Windows it is a bit more tricky to use it in a non-standard way, but it is doable and worth half a day of playing around to achieve that.

Cheap thermal printer for the occasional receipt & voucher printing in our line of business. We already have a Dymo for heavy duty label printing but it does not work well with vouchers and receipts. If you rely on receipts a lot for your personal or business use then I would not recommend this however for the occasional use this is perfect. It comes with a CD which includes the drivers. Setup is also very easy. Simple plug and play operation.

Quite surprised as to how it actually works, but it does! A bit pricey though, and therefore the 4-star review.

I would give this a rating of '0' if I could. Still didn't work after 3 hours of attempting to connect it through Bluetooth and wifi. Contacted seller who said it didn't work on wifi but it had wifi instructions included. It was despatched in the U.K. but I was asked to return it to China or Spain with a "Lithium Battery" label, which it didn't arrive with. So no UK return address.

It doesn’t print any words