Why such fat bar code out of the thermal printer?

[rprosperi]

(08-04-2015 01:20 PM)4ster Wrote:  I still use the 82162A and a plotter module in my 41 to print bar code. (I know, I am a troglodyte.)

I've always wondered why the HP software engineers wrote the code for the thermal printer so that the bar code was so fat compared to that printed in the manuals or created on a plotter? On modern, white thermal paper my printer still prints crisp, high contrast black and white code. It is certainly capable of printing more compact bar code.

Was it a byte restriction in the 41 alpha register or the print buffer? That is the only thing I can come up with.

Just curious.

On thermal paper (in particular back in the '80s) there is less precise control of the "thickness" of the printed line, due to paper age, battery levels, moisture, etc. etc. so the only way to reliably get good scans (which is based on the ratio of white to black line thicknesses) was to scale up the size of the printed bar codes, and it worked quite well.

The pre-printed barcodes they published were printed using methods with much finer control of the print size/quality, hence they were able to provide much smaller barcode.

Today, enthusiasts like us use good quality paper, have excellent power sources, and are quite careful to do this "right". Back in the day, HP was targeting just plain old vanilla customers, so had to have a solution that was reliable under lots of poor conditions.