Multi-Purpose Printing

The sentiment across the industry is that the bar code will never go the way of the rotary phone or the typewriter, but will instead be used as a complementary technology to RFID. Thermal transfer has many benefits that can also be useful in smart label printing, Briganti said. “RFID is beginning to change how products are tracked throughout the supply chain. From a label paper perspective, even with RFID, most users require human-readable information to be printed on a label as back-up in the event of RFID tag failure. Thermal transfer label printing offers low-cost system redundancy. We believe that, in the foreseeable future, both RFID and human-readable bar code technology will co-exist as complementary information systems.”