Our tech services team wanted us to do an article about this topic. It is not a showstopper, but it could be concerning if you see it occur. It is sort of a good news, bad news thing. The bad news is that your Zebra ZT printers could take several minutes to calibrate before printing an RFID-enabled label. The good news is that it should print them flawlessly after the calibration is complete.
The Xi printers did not have this delay, but were rather dependent on you telling it what format of RFID label you were using, it then expected the inlay to be in that spot every time. Usually reliable, but sometimes you would get a higher than desired number of RFID labels that backed up and X’d out due to encoding issues.
The newer ZT printers do the calibration differently, slowly incrementing the label through the built-in encoder, reading from multiple antenna’s each increment to sense the exact location of the inlay and ensuring that the encoding happens at just the right time with just the right power and antenna being used.
A far superior way to get the job done, but it takes a few minutes as the printer slowly steps the label through the printing and encoding path.
If you want to partner with a technology company that is always striving to make the technology easily understood, visit us at www.emptechgroup.com to learn more about how we can help you with these advanced technologies.