Sato Japan is the world’s third biggest manufacturer of Desk top printers behind both Zebra and TEC.

Sato originally manufactured hand held pricing machines, but in recent years has moved emphasis away from that business in pursuit of TEC and Zebra with a goal of overtaking both of these companies to become the world’s dominant supplier of desk top printers

Sato UK was originally the highly respected and profitable British company NOR-SYSTEMS, taken over by Sato about 10 years ago; it is now a poor shadow of its former self.

Sato UK are based in Harwich but have just recently closed its four UK branch offices Sato has reduced its salesforce and no longer offers onsite service. Sato now places most of its emphasis on selling Desk Top thermal printers rather than hand held labelling.

However almost all of Sato’s hand held machines and labels are available from alternative suppliers like PID.

Thermal Printing is today’s most efficient system of in house label printing, and is an Ideal low cost system for both retail and industry to handle short run, variable detail and bar code printing.

Thermal Printing is basically a heat activated print head, made up of hundreds of ceramic pins which heat up to form letters, numbers, bar codes or even pictures. These images are then transferred to a label, made of paper, plastic or even clear acetate

There are two main types of Thermal printing, “thermal transfer” where carbon ribbons are used to transfer words or images to the label, the other system of Thermal Printing is to use chemi thermal paper, which has a chemical layer inside the paper which turns black in contact with heat

Linked to your computer with a user friendly software package Thermal Printing allows the end user to design and print their own bespoke label from scratch, store it and recall it when needed. Thermal printing removes the cost of design, origination and forward ordering and storage.

If your requirement is lots of short run label, i.e. date coding, ingredients, part numbering, bar coding then you need to be looking at Thermal Printing for your business needs.