You would never want your point of sale system to be down because you ran out of paper. Receipt and remote printers are the parts of your point of sale system most prone to failure. They get the most use and have the most wear and tear of any part of your system. This is also true for printers for sale. For the most part, scanners, cash drawers and pole displays will not work with a parallel interface. Most printer manufacturers sell their printers at or even below cost, which makes them seem amazingly affordable.
In most cases, they send the printer off for repair and never get beyond the simple repairs that can be done locally. Which is similar to HP printers for sale most of the time. Virtually every major printer manufacturer has been involved in lawsuits regarding the sale and use of re-manufactured inkjet or laser printer ink cartridges. They did so because of the superior speed and reliability of the parallel interface compared to the then standard serial connection.
In most businesses this is totally unacceptable and can cause significant loss of customer service. ” For these unlabelled items, Lexmark has a program that gives a 20% discount on ink cartridges if consumers return them to Lexmark after a single use. That makes them difficult to use as remote printers since those runs require distances of 100′ - 300′ feet from the connection point.
Other than that you should not have any major problems exchanging a dot matrix for thermal at the point of sale. Tonik has been selling inkjet cartridges and toner cartridges since 2001. Usually this is the exact opposite of cheap printers for sale. These same connectors are perfect for receipt printers because they lock into place.
Downtime is reduced from hours or days to a matter of minutes. Not all point of sale software uses parallel printers.