Thermal Printing – A cool new thing?

By accident, I kinda stumbled upon the world of thermal printing or better say, its use for tiny printers which you can take along with you to make stickers, notes and scrapbooking with. Thermal printing itself is actually something we all have come in contact with in the form of receipts you get at a cash register. But using it for private creative projects was a totally new concept to me. It was intriguing enough that I wanted to try it out. But after doing some basic research I found out that thermal printers come with their own advantages and disadvantages. So let me introduce you to the Phomemo M02 Pro and tell you what I like and what I don’t like about it.

Let’s start with the specs of the M02Pro, it’s 3,3 * 3,2 * 1,6 inches and fits effortlessly in the palm of my hand. Paired with its lightweight of about 400g, it lives up to its name and makes a very portable printer, that fits into almost every handbag or even the pockets of a jacket. I could not find any definitive answer as to how long the device holds up, other than Phomemo themselves saying “can print 6 rolls of paper continuously when fully charged”, which I could not really test out… But when I was using it to make about 10 cards, it never died on me. I charged it overnight and was able to use it multiple times the day after. So I would say it’s at least decent for normal usage :)It connects wirelessly via Bluetooth with any android or apple device, in my review here I used an iPadPro and a Samsung Note and it worked without problems. All of this sounds like an advertisement, but I don’t get paid to say that xD Those technical specifications are one of the reasons why I was so interested to get one of these things for myself, it almost sounds too good to be true 😛 And it actually might be…

Some of you might already know how Thermal printing works, but let me explain it again so that we are all on the same page. Ink printers use one or multiple coloured inks to bring a certain image onto a paper. For that, you can use almost every paper but not every ink and when the cartridges are empty, they have to be refilled, often at a high price, which is one of the reasons why I stopped refilling my normal printer at one point. The thermal printers technically do not have this problem, because they work fully without ink, instead, they use a special paper with a thermal sensitive coding which is activated by the printer applying heat to it. This means that you can only use special kinds of paper, but you will never have to refill any cartridges. The biggest problem that comes with that though, is the fact that the image created on thermal paper will fade away after some time.

It’s hard to say how long the paper with the image printed onto it will hold up, because the paper used in these special printers like the one I review here, created for the purpose of using it at home, is a little different from the receipt paper you would get in a supermarket. It also highly depends on the way you store it. If it is in a cold and dark room, it will obviously last longer, than when it sits in direct sunlight. Different sources on the internet say different things, but the average time that a thermal printed paper will hold up in good storage condition seems to be between 5 and 7 years. Phomemo themselves state on their website that: “Just like all other thermal paper, our prints will eventually fade. Different paper has different storage time, we have 2 yrs,5 yrs,10 yrs,20 yrs, long term effective(over 20 yrs) for your reference.” Which is still quite the bummer, at least it was for me. But after thinking about it for a while, I came to the conclusion that you could still get a great value out of a product like this, depending on what project you plan on using it for.

Let me tell you a bit about what you can actually do with a Phomemo thermal printer. To operate it you need to install a free app that comes itself equipped with some free-to-use templates for different tasks. Such as to-do lists, different frames or you could just type your own text into the app and it will be printed out, making it a great use for label printing. You could also use your own images such as pictures you made yourself, free to use stuff from the internet or your own art. I tried out all of these options and have to say it might not be the best photo printer, but I loved being able to just print something aesthetically fitting the theme of a project I did or making my own art into stickers.

For my review, I have used 3 different kinds of paper, all of which have been self-adhesive: plain white paper, transparent paper and silver glitter paper. On their website, it says that all of them are long time effective papers, said to hold up more than 20 years. I mostly choose them because they were part of a kit you were able to pursue on amazon and I did not want to put too much money into something, I had not really tested yet. But there are some more options to choose from like semi-transparent paper, normal coloured paper(which gives your black and white image a coloured background, sometimes even with a nice pattern) or paper which makes your print a different colour. That last paper is what I am most interested in since it’s as of now the only way I have seen printing something in colour, using the thermal printing method. Maybe I will use it in a future review 😉

When you are following my blog for a long time now, you must have seen that I like to design greetings cards myself and send them off to friends and family. I have used different methods for my designs, I have hand-drawn them using different pencils or watercolours, I tried fully digitally painting and later printing and I even used some scrapbooking techniques with different stickers and Washi tape. This scrapbooking technique is what I used the least, mostly because I needed to rebuy stickers for it over and over again, since using multiple stickers for one card, makes them deplete very fast. And honestly, that was always something which I dreaded, that I needed to know in advance which kind of stickers I wanted to use and also buy them in advance. With the thermal printer, I can come up with designs for stickers myself or search for already existing designs(free-to-use) fitting the mood I am in or the card I am designing. Which I love, but it would also mean, that nobody could really keep my cards, since the designs would fade away eventually. But honestly, nothing lasts forever, right? And maybe that makes the cards and the experience of receiving them even more unique and interesting 😉

Obviously, in this review, I was not able to try out all of the different options you have with this thermal printer, but I hope that I was able to at least give you a good overview of the product and you now have a better idea if it would be something for you or not. I can’t say that I am fully convinced about thermal printing being the best printing and I think it highly depends on the person and what they intend to use the prints for, but at least for me, it was worth buying and trying this printer out. I especially liked how the transparent stickers did not fully cover the scrapbooking background I made, but kinda added to it. If I keep using it on a regular base, I try to make a follow-up review maybe using different papers but also showing how much the designs I made in this review faded until then. If you have any questions or use a thermal printer yourself, tell me about it in the comments 😉

Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress