Alps Electric Co., Ltd.

Akio Yamashita

Kazutaka Suzuki

Kazuhiko Hatakeyama

There is provided a printer which does not require a space for opening and closing a body cover, can be installed in any place, and can be small and thin. A printing head is provided in a printer body having in its front an opening. A recording sheet is inserted into a housing of a cover provided with a platen roller. Part of the recording sheet is placed on the platen roller. The cover is inserted from the opening of the printer body into the printer body. The printing head is resiliently pressed through the recording sheet onto the platen roller.

Printer installable in small space

A thermal printer capable of producing labels, in addition to printing on normal paper. The printer includes a switching unit for switching between a label making mode and a normal printing mode. In the label making mode, characters are printed onto a receptor tape using a special label-making ink ribbon cassette. In the normal printing mode, a normal ink ribbon cassette is substituted for the special label-making cassette.

Thermal printer with label printing mode

The present invention relates to a label creation cassette capable of creating a label when mounted on a thermal printer used as an output unit for personal computers and wordprocessors. A cassette case 1 with a substantially rectangular surface includes substantially cylindrical cores 2a, 2b, 2c each rotatably supported therein. An image transfer tape 3 is wound around the core 2a of these three cores. Further, a thermal transfer ink ribbon 4 is wound around one of the remaining two cores or the core 2b and the other core 2c is used to wind the ink ribbon 4.

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Iwate-ken, Japan

Akio Yamashita