Zebra ZM400 Printer Repair & Calibration - Thunderbird Technical Services

http://www.thunderbirdservice.com Interested in Zebra Printer Service or Repair? Contact the professionals at Thunderbird Technical Services today by calling 513-659-1067. Today we're going to calibrate the Zebra ZM400 printer. As always, make sure that the paper path is clear of any obstructions and there are no stuck labels inside the print mechanism. Take a good look underneath the media dancer assembly to make sure that there's no paper or anything stuck under it or anything that might indicate that it is blocking the media sensor. It's a good idea to keep that dancer assembly clean of adhesive, also. Load the media in the path shown here. Make sure that the ribbon is loaded properly. Here, you can see that the ribbon is loaded on the supply spindle. The ribbon goes underneath the print head and over to the ribbon take-up assembly. On any Z-Series Zebra printer, make sure that after you've loaded the ribbon, that it covers all the way over to the left edge of the printer as you're looking at it. The reason is because the ribbon sensor is right on this side on the inside of the frame. If the ribbon does not cover that sensor, it will give you a ribbon out. From the front panel of the printer, press the Setup/Exit key. Press the + key until you come to Media and Ribbon. Press the Select button and press the + key as indicated by the Calibrate button to calibrate. Now it tells you to load the backing. To load the backing, pull a label or two off the liner, open up the print head, pull just the liner through until just liner is underneath the red light. Press the + button to continue. It says to remove the ribbon. You don't necessarily have to completely remove the ribbon. Open up the print head, expose that plate so that you do not have any ribbon on this side of the printer. Press the + sign to continue. Now the printer will calibrate. This it says to reload all. Open up the print head, straighten out your ribbon as mentioned before, pull your labels and media through. Make sure your ribbon is all the way over to the left. Close the print head. Press the + sign to continue. Your printer has calibrated. To see how well your printer calibrated, press the Setup/Exit button and press the + key until you come to Sensor Profile. Press the Select button, press the + sign to print. The printer has just completed printing a graphical representation of how it sees the media, the gaps between the media, and the liner. You'll see a good baseline with nice spikes indicating that it's getting a good voltage spike or a light intensity though the liner. The black even square at the end shows a nice, even pitch on how it sees the ribbon. If the top of this graph was ragged, you may get a lot of ribbon out errors. Here it's nice and straight, so there will be no ribbon out errors on this printer.