Zebra Card Printers & Technical Support
One of my many hats is the Security of our facilities and personnel as well as network and data. As one of my established policies every staffer, in-building business partner and frequent visitor is badged with our corporate identification card. For a long time I blissfully paid my friends at Alarmlink Life Safety Systems to print them as needed.
At some point the decision was made to badge our field contractors and with several hundred of them spending $20 each wasn’t a good option so we bought a Zebra P330i printer and the necessary stock to do the job. The printer is finicky and occasionally obstinate but it prints a nice card and hadn’t presented any show stopping problems short of those associated with one bad ribbon.
Last week the printer started misaligning the color bands on the ribbon, printing a yellow band across the bottom 3/8ths inch of each card. Nothing I tried fixed the problem for more than a single card and eventually the printer decided it also didn’t like the ribbon either, of which there were at least 100 cards remaining. Google turned up a few more things to try as did a call to my friends at Alarmlink, but none of these fixed the issue
At this point I turn to Zebra’s support link on their website and submitted an incident. After two days I’d all but given up hope that I’d get any kind of support.
Then the phone rings and it was a tech from Zebra. The fix wasn’t quick, it took 45 minutes on the phone to get the printer working again. But during it all I never felt I was being rushed by the tech. Quite the converse, he was exceedingly patient. But most importantly - he actually helped me fix the problem.
It is sad that this is more the exception rather than the rule.