It arrived a couple of months ago, and sat in its box waiting to be deployed. A few weekends back, we had events to staff in two different locations, so I concluded that the time had come to put the Epson to work. I set up the drivers on a spare laptop at home, verified that the printer could send the signal to kick the cash drawer open, and packed it (and the spare drawer) up for the trip. (The older, fully tested setup went to the other event.) At the convention, I successfully installed Epson's "Advanced Printer Driver v4.07" on my aging Dell C610 laptop, and immediately encountered the SLOWEST performance from a receipt printer that I have ever seen. It was DISMAL. I could literally count out the customer's change and bag their purchase in the time it took for a two-item receipt (with no logo) to print. I didn't want to risk disabling the setup entirely, however, so I put up with it through the course of that weekend.In retrospect, that may have been both smart and unnecessary.
Late this past week, I decided to look more closely at the printer's driver settings in an effort to try to speed up the printing. I noticed that it was set up to use the Windows Truetype fonts instead of substituting the printer's own native fonts. I suspected that this might be part of the lack-of-speed problem, since that likely meant that the various lines of the receipt were getting converted to graphics before being sent to the printer. After a little futzing around, I had every Truetype font set to be replaced by the printer's first listed native font (FontA, to be specific...whatever that was). Lo and behold, the receipts printed instantaneously! Problem solved...I thought.
Emboldened by my success, I decided to extend the printer's usefulness by installing the official Epson drivers on my other laptop, an even older Dell L400. That's when things got Interesting.
On every attempt, the drivers took about 10 minutes to unpack and install themselves. I believe I tried it a total of nine different times; that's an hour and a half of my time that I'll never get back. And the installation time was just the beginning. When you add in the hours spent testing various bits of the setup, and discovering that it was perfectly possible to print things on the Epson as long as the Epson's driver wasn't used, it ate the better part of a very frustrating afternoon.
I could go on at length about the various blind alleys I chased along in the vain hope of getting the Epson printer to work with the Epson driver. And at one point, I actually managed to make it work...briefly. In going over the difference between the setup I'd used on the road and the setup I was working with to try to get the printer working with the L400, I noticed that I wasn't using the same cable as I had employed at the convention. A little metaphoric light flashed on, and I dug out and installed the cable I'd used with the C610. A miracle! Suddenly the Epson driver worked! But not for long. After another hour of configuration testing in search of a way to get it to stop wasting way too much paper (ultimately concluded to be yet another problem in the Epson Advanced Printer Driver) it once again quit working with the Epson driver...and another reinstall didn't change that outcome.
In the process of all of this, however, I discovered that the drivers for my also-aging Ithaca Series 80 receipt printer, which is designed to emulate an Epson TM88, would work just fine with an actual Epson TM88. And they provided the hoped-for solution to the wasted-paper problem as well...since it simply didn't happen with the Ithaca driver.
Bottom line Part 1: The Epson TM88III printer with a Parallel interface would work OK (but take a lot more config fiddling than I really liked) with my Dell C610 using the Epson drivers. It would not work reliably at all with the Epson drivers on my Dell L400, but it worked just fine with the drivers for an Ithaca Series 80 on the L400. Now, admittedly, the Ithaca's driver's don't support the fancy features like the use of a graphic logo, but I don't use those anyway; they're no loss as far as I'm concerned.
Bottom line Part 2: If you need a fast, reliable receipt printer, and you don't care about including graphics on the receipt, the Epson can probably be made to work one way or another...but there are other choices which might be a lot less frustrating. If you need to be able to print a graphic logo or other image on your receipts, I'd suggest looking at the Star Micronics line instead. I occasionally have used a borrowed TSP100, and its drivers have never exhibited the least bit of hardware finickiness with any of the laptops I've tried...including the L400.
