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Zebra label printers · Australian stockDesktop printers for a counter or an office, industrial printers for a warehouse or a production line, mobile printers for the label that has to be made where the work is, and the labels and ribbons that feed them all. Prices are what you pay, in Australian dollars, including GST, excluding freight.
There is one question to answer before the model matters, and it is the one underneath. Get it wrong and the printer is fine but the labels are unreadable in a year.
Every label printer is one of two things, and the model number usually ends in a letter that tells you which. It is the difference between a label that lasts a fortnight and one that lasts a decade.
Heat goes straight onto heat-sensitive stock. Nothing to load, nothing to replace, and the lowest running cost there is. The print fades with sunlight, heat and handling — which does not matter at all on a courier label read once, and matters a great deal on anything still being scanned next year.
Right for: despatch and courier labels, food date labels, anything read within weeks.
Costs a consumable and a moment loading it. In exchange the print does not fade, and on the right stock it survives sunlight, water, and being rubbed against things in a warehouse for years.
Right for: shelf and bin labels, asset tags, product labels, anything outdoors or handled.
The pairing is the part that goes wrong. A ribbon run against the wrong stock is the most common way a printhead dies early, and the printhead is the expensive part of the printer. We supply the labels and the ribbons as well as the machine, so the matching is our problem rather than something you find out about at the third replacement.
The price is on every one of them, and anything in the Zebra range can be quoted whether or not it has reached this page.
The desktop printer for somebody printing labels rather than running a production line. Four inch, USB, and available either way — with a ribbon or without.
The step up from the ZD220. Same four inch label and the same ribbon-or-not choice, built for more printing — and it connects by USB, Ethernet or wireless rather than only the one way.
The top of the desktop range. A colour touch screen, a dual-wall frame and ribbons four times longer than the machines below it — for a printer somebody actually operates rather than one that sits in a corner.
The industrial machine at desktop width. Four inches, a metal frame, and quicker than the six inch ZT421 — with peel-and-rewind or wireless as the two upgrades, at the same price for different reasons.
All metal, with sealed dome buttons, gigabit Ethernet and a serial port. The one to put somewhere the air is not clean — plainer than the ZT411, and not much more. Not a wash-down printer; the page says why.
The industrial machine for labels wider than a desktop printer takes. Six inches, a metal frame, and a roll that lasts a shift — with an optional peel and rewind that is fitted at the factory.
The three inch mobile printer, worn on a strap and printing where the work is. Shelf labels, pick labels and receipts, with a battery meant for the shift.
The four inch mobile printer — the width a desktop or industrial machine prints, made at the pallet or the racking instead of carried out from an office. Battery for a full day.
Eight printers on this page, and that is the honest state of it. Three desktop, three industrial and two mobile, which covers most of what a warehouse actually orders.
Everything Zebra makes can be quoted whether or not it has reached this page — the list here is what has been priced and photographed, not the limit of what we supply. That includes machines Zebra no longer makes. If you are running a Z105SL, a ZM400 or anything else from that era, we still know them, still repair them and can tell you what replaces yours.
This is the ribbon question above, and it decides the printer before anything else does. Weeks, and direct thermal is cheaper to run. Years, and it has to be thermal transfer.
Most desktop printers take up to four inches, which covers the great majority of shelf, product and despatch labels. Wider than that is an industrial machine and a different conversation.
Most warehouse labels are 203 dpi and always have been. 300 dpi is for small type and dense 2D codes. 600 dpi is for genuinely fine detail on a small label — the sort that goes on a component or an instrument rather than a carton.
A retail barcode is where this stops being academic. An EAN-13 module at 100% is 0.330 mm, and a printhead can only lay down whole dots. A 203 dpi head is 8 dots to the millimetre, so one dot is 0.125 mm: two dots is 0.250, which is 76%, and three is 0.375, which is 114%. Nothing lands in between.
76% is under the 80% GS1 sets as the minimum for a retail scanner, so on a 203 dpi head the answer is 114% — a barcode bigger than nominal, on a pack that has to make room for it. A 300 dpi head is 11.8 dots to the millimetre, and four of those is 0.339 mm, or 103%. Three per cent over nominal, against fourteen — which is why an EAN-13 at 100% is a 300 dpi job.
So 203 is not a barrier to selling through a retailer; it is a different size on the pack. Worth knowing before you buy, because it is decided by the printhead and not by the artwork.
The barcode number itself comes from GS1 — you join, they issue it, and having it tested is between you and them. What we can tell you is what the printer will put on the label, and whether the machine in front of you can print it at the size a retailer expects.
It is not a setting. The resolution is the printhead, so it is decided when the machine is bought and changing it later means a new head. The cards above say what each machine is listed at — ask if you need one that is not there, and the printhead list names all three resolutions with their part numbers.
And the resolution you land on is the same number that decides where anything sits on the label, because ZPL positions in dots rather than millimetres — 8 to the millimetre at 203 dpi and 12 at 300. That page has a label, the code that prints it, and the arithmetic.
A few hundred is a ZD220. Around a thousand freight labels a day is a ZD421 or a ZD621 — built for it in a way the entry-level machine is not. Continuous, all day, every shift, is an industrial machine.
None of that is a rated figure and we will not pretend otherwise. It is what selling them for thirty-five years says, which we think is worth more than a duty cycle nobody tests.
A PC over USB is the simple case. A network, an ERP system, or a handheld out on the floor is not harder, but it is worth saying out loud before you buy, because it changes which model and which options.
Most of the printers we are asked about were bought before the person asking started the job. They are still running, they are out of warranty, and the question is never which model to buy. It is one of these three.
Mostly yes — and the honest answer is different for each machine, which is worth knowing before anybody quotes you.
The industrial lines are well supplied, and they are worth seeing written out, because a row of names turns out to be one machine growing up. Four inch: the Z4M, discontinued in March 2004; the Z4M Plus — quicker on a complex label, more memory, more ZPL II — discontinued in January 2008; then the ZM400, then the ZT410, and now the ZT411. Six inch runs the same way: the Z6M, then the ZM600, then the ZT420, and now the ZT421. Printheads for most of those are current parts, and a 105SL or an S4M likewise. A 170Xi4 is still obtainable through a Zebra partner; an older 170Xi3 we would have to check for you.
The Z6M is the one that has genuinely run out. Zebra does not make that printhead any more, so what you can buy is an OEM printhead rather than a genuine Zebra one. We will say so before you buy it rather than after — that is the difference between the right part for an old machine and a part somebody sold you as something it was not.
What we need is the number off the plate, not the name the office uses for it. The printheads page lists what we hold and takes the model and the symptom — a white line down every label is a different answer from faint on one side.
This is arithmetic, and it is arithmetic we will do out loud rather than guess at. A printhead plus labour, against the price of a machine that is faster, quieter and still supported. Sometimes the repair is obviously right — a good industrial printer with one worn part has years left in it. Sometimes it is not, and the honest answer is that you are about to spend half the cost of a new one on a printer that will want the other half next year.
What decides it is rarely the printer. It is how many labels a day it prints, whether there is a second one beside it when it stops, and what a stopped line costs for an hour. Service and repairs covers what we do and what it costs, and a service call can be booked without ringing first.
The ZT411 — but not always, and the exception is worth a minute. A Zebra Stripe from the nineties and a Z4M from the two-thousands were both four-inch industrial machines built for volumes a modern desktop printer handles without noticing. Plenty of the work those printers were bought for now runs perfectly well on a ZD421 at a fraction of the price, because the volume that justified an industrial machine in 1998 is not what it turned out to be.
If the volume genuinely is still there, the ZT411 is the direct descendant, and the six-inch answer is the ZT421.
Three questions before anybody quotes: how many labels a day, what they are printed onto, and whether the ribbon and stock you already buy still fit. The last one catches people — a new printer that wants a different core size quietly changes what every future carton of labels costs.
Bring the label you use now, or a photograph of it. Half of all print quality problems are a ribbon and a stock that were never meant to meet, and that is visible in a picture.
