Choosing a thermal printer for a café or restaurant

There are dozens of thermal printers on the market and every one of them says it suits a restaurant. In practice a venue’s needs come down to three questions: paper width, how it connects, and whether it prints Turkish characters.

80 mm is the standard

A kitchen ticket has to hold the product name, the note and the table together. 58 mm is too narrow; long product names wrap and legibility drops. ari-adisyon targets 80 mm thermal paper, which is also the most widely stocked roll size in the trade.

Connection: network, agent or browser

• Network printer (port 9100): the fastest and most robust option when it is on the same local network as the till. You enter the IP address and print a test ticket.
• Cloud agent: for USB printers or devices on a different network. A small desktop program introduces the printer to the system.
• Browser printing: for trying it out immediately. It needs a click per ticket, so it is not a permanent answer.

ESC/POS and Turkish characters

The printer has to speak ESC/POS, otherwise the formatting and cut commands do nothing. For Turkish it must support the CP857 code page; without it letters such as ş, ğ and ı come out mangled.

On our hardware page we mark each model as "tested", "expected to work" or "not supported". A model that is not on the list may well work — these are the criteria.