New Intermec PM43 Printer

I don’t know about you, but there has been so little innovation from Intermec for a while, I had thought they had abandoned the industrial printer business.

Happily, it turns out this wasn’t the case and the company has announced the new PM43 and PM43C models.

Intermec’s legacy 3400 printers were really successful and there are still many thousands in use. The 2nd generation, the PM4i was somewhat underwhelming so we are really interested to see how the PM43 works out.

The look of the printer has certainly been improved, a nice little touch screen colour LCD replaces the awful display from the PM4i and the overall design is quite stylish in Intermec grey and blue.

The printer comes with serial, USB 2.0 and Ethernet as standard with plenty of optional connectivity including wireless and USB host.

I’m particularly interested in the PM43C version – very small and compact.

The PM43 comes with Intermec’s Precision Print feature – this should allow very accurate label registration, as we enjoyed on the now EOL Intermec 3240 model. The huge downside (I honestly don’t understand this at all!) is that the printer is still stuck with 400 DPI resolution. We have a lot of customers who need 600 DPI for their applications so the PM43 will not work for them. 203 and 300 DPI is available as one would expect.

The other major downside is that (like all Intermec printers) the new models are not made in the USA.

My colleague Harry, here at Winco, has had the opportunity for a hands-on session with the new printer and he reports that he likes it a lot.

I’m hoping we’ll be getting a PM43 to give a real test and review in the near future.

In the meantime, let me know (603-598-1553) if you’d like more info. You can download the specs from Intermec as well if you like.

Update – the Intermec guys kindly let me have a PM43 to test out. You can read my thoughts on my PM43 Review page.