Information about Passbook Printers

Passbook printers are specialized printers used in many financial institutions to print on passbook, i.e. a paper book used to record transactions on a deposit account.

Passbooks continue to be widely used, in banks, finance houses, public administration and post offices. This method of receipting deposits and withdrawals has been with us for very many years, going back many generations. Due to customers request, banks have stoically ignored the pressure to migrate to the many modern methods offered for completing such transactions, and in some markets (like US) capitalized on customers resistance to change, offering less competitive conditions for this type of accounts than for other types (see [1]

Almost every geographical area of the world today, uses passbooks and whilst the institutions may desire the move to more productive methods, demand ensures the survival of this vintage technology.

Characteristics

Passbook printers are usually installed at the teller, and are usually impact printers (see Dot_matrix_printer). The main reason to use this technology instead more modern one, is banks large use of preprinted multi-ply forms to issuing multiple copies of documents (Carbon_copy). The most important characteristics who make a printer capable to work in the demanding bank environment as passbook printer are paper treatment and reliability, followed by transaction speed.

Transaction speed is measured counting the time needed to load, align, print and eject the document. Due to limited amount of characters per transaction usually printed by passbook printers, a simple comparison of printing speed (usually expressed in characters per second) isn't normally the best way to compare performances. Transaction speed is more meaningful.

Paper treatment indicate both the range of documents treated (thickness, dimensions, number of copies) and how printer treat it. Two family of treatments are currently on the market. The high-end products, like market leader PR2 plus by Olivetti or PLQ-20 by Epson, automatically detect document borders using a photosensor and use it as reference, assuring the accuracy in print positioning is not affected by operator handling precision. Other products, like 4915 by Wincor or 5040 by TallyGenicom use a hard edge, usually the printing path border, as reference, and operator has to push document precisely against it, thus the accuracy depend more by operator than by machine.

All passbook printers usually include Automatic Paper Alignment and Automatic Thickness Adjustment.

Automatic paper alignment means that documents, like forms, are moved by printer to correct their insertion direction assuring parallelism between document and printing path borders, thus limiting skew to an un-noticeable amount.

Automatic thickness adjustment, means printer automatically sense document thickness and adjust to it. This is because a passbook can be extremely thick, up to a couple of millimeters, even more sometimes, and its thickness could change during printing width, for example when there are more pages on one side. Due to high thickness documents rigidity, all passbook printers have a flat bed paper path, that means the paper will never have to bend around curved platens, assuring reliability of operation.

Reliability is a major feature for this kind of printers, due to extremely high duty of tellers. Duty of some hundreds transactions per day (up to 500-600) are common, and cope with this duties require a very optimized design, the best materials and a very precise assembly. For this reason, often the best choice reveal itself only after some years of work.

External links

• Olivetti PR2 line (retrieved October 15th, 2007)
• Tally Genicom 5040 (retrieved October 15th, 2007)
• Wincor 4915 (retrieved October 15th, 2007)