Thermal printer applications

Thermal printers print more quietly and usually faster than impact dot matrix printers. They are also smaller, lighter and consume less power, making them ideal for portable and retail applications. Roll-based printers can be rapidly refilled. Commercial applications of thermal printers include filling station pumps, information kiosks, point of sale systems, voucher printers in slot machines, print on demand labels for shipping and products, and for recording live rhythm strips on hospital cardiac monitors.

Thermal printers are still commonly used in seafloor exploration and engineering geology due to their portability, speed, and ability to create continuous reels or sheets. Typically, thermal printers found in offshore applications are used to print realtime records of side scan sonar and sub-seafloor seismic imagery. In data processing, thermal printers are sometimes used to quickly create hard copies of continuous seismic or hydrographic records stored in digital SEG Y or XTF form.

The Game Boy Printer, released in 1998, was a small thermal printer used to print out certain elements from some Game Boy games.

Hospitals commonly record fetal ultrasound scan images on thermal paper printed by thermal printers.

In addition, thermal printers also are largely utilized in handheld terminals, taximeters, mini calculators, ATMs & banking machines, ticket printers, lottery devices, receipt printers, data terminal devices, measuring instruments and analyzers, scale apparatuses, detecting systems, parking lot, queue systems and so on field.