Printronix Brand Guidelines: The Irvine Line Matrix Printer Maker Founded in 1974

A line printer maker from Southern California.

Printronix was founded in 1974 in Southern California. A Los Angeles Times report of January 1998 describes it as “Irvine-based Printronix, founded in 1974,” a company that designed and made line matrix, laser and thermal printers for business and industrial use, and the company still gives 1974 and Irvine, California, in its own press releases. English Wikipedia names Robert A. Kleist, Gordon B. Barrus and David Mayne among the founders, says the group began work in a garage in Playa del Rey, and credits Barrus with a prototype line printer called the P300.

Its speciality became the line matrix printer, an industrial impact printer. When Acacia Research bought the company in 2021, its announcement said such printers were relied on for printing on unusual sizes and shapes of paper and card stock, on multi-part carbon copy forms, and in harsh conditions of heat, humidity, cold and dust. Printronix’s own releases describe its printers producing invoices, reports, build sheets, shipping and transport documents and labels.

English Wikipedia says Printronix went public on the Nasdaq in 1976, opened a manufacturing facility in the Netherlands in 1981 and a facility in Singapore in 1985, and expanded into India in 1995 and China in 1998.

Barcode work arrived through acquisition. In January 1998 the Los Angeles Times reported that a Printronix subsidiary had bought the bar code verification business and the RJS name from Eltron International of Simi Valley, a maker of thermal label and plastic card printers; Eltron kept its own industrial thermal printer lines. Verification, checking that a printed barcode can be read, later became one of the features of Printronix thermal printers.

Private owners and a split.

Printronix later left the stock market. A January 2013 announcement from the advisory firm BDA Partners says Printronix had been a portfolio company of the investment firm Vector Capital since 2007, and had just been acquired by Corona Investment Partners; its management stayed in place and its head office remained in Irvine. English Wikipedia says the company bought TallyGenicom in 2009, and Printronix still names TallyGenicom as its second brand in its press releases.

In November 2015 the business divided. The trade site VARInsights and the analyst firm VDC Research both reported on 9 November 2015 that the Taiwanese barcode printer maker TSC Auto ID Technology had signed an agreement to buy Printronix’s thermal printing business, with closing expected in January 2016. TSC took the intellectual property and branding rights to Printronix’s industrial thermal stationary and mobile printers, barcode verification, RFID and PrintCart product lines, which were to run as a stand-alone company called Printronix Auto ID. The two firms had already worked together on industrial and mobile printers under an original design manufacturing arrangement since 2012, the announcement said. VDC Research noted at the time that Printronix was the only vendor offering industrial label printers with in-line verification.

TSC has since presented the two names together. In a December 2020 interview published on TSC’s own website, its president said TSC had acquired Printronix Auto ID in 2016 and described a combined TSC Printronix Auto ID portfolio. The Printronix name therefore now appears on two businesses: the Irvine impact printer company, and the thermal printer line owned by TSC.

The Irvine company changed hands again in October 2021, when the Nasdaq-listed Acacia Research Corporation announced that it had acquired Printronix Holding Corp., which it described as a manufacturer and distributor of industrial impact printers, also known as line matrix printers, with related consumables and services. Printronix’s chief executive said at the time that the company hoped to grow through acquisitions and partnerships in adjacent markets.

Labels, receipts and ribbons.

Label and receipt printers are rarely noticed by the people who use their output. A shipping label on a parcel, a price tag on a shelf, a wristband, a till receipt or a ticket from a self-checkout machine all come from small thermal printers that sit out of sight, and the companies that make them present themselves less as consumer brands than as suppliers to warehouses, shops, hospitals and factories.

Their catalogues follow the places where the printers work. Desktop label printers sit on packing benches and in back offices; larger industrial models run around the clock on distribution lines and print-and-apply systems; receipt printers sit at shop counters and inside kiosks; and handheld printers hang from belts and shoulder straps in delivery vans and store aisles. Alongside the machines, most makers sell the consumables that keep them running, from label rolls and wristbands to thermal transfer ribbons, as well as software for managing whole fleets of printers.

The trade meets at fairs rather than in shop windows. Makers show new models at events such as LogiMAT in Stuttgart for warehousing and logistics, the NRF retail show in New York, and EuroShop in Düsseldorf for retail equipment, where printers appear alongside scanners, mobile computers and RFID readers. Product names are mostly codes of letters and numbers, as in the ranges described in this guide.

Many of the makers have changed hands, merged or grown out of larger electronics groups, so their names often carry traces of earlier owners. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — where it began, who owns it now and what it makes — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Impact printers, then colour.

Under Acacia the range has widened beyond impact printing. In July 2022 Printronix announced its first industrial colour printers, the LP654C for letter and A4 paper and the LP844C for tabloid and A3, aimed at work such as colour-coded picking tickets and warehouse shelf labels. In April 2023 it announced an exclusive agreement with Fujitsu Isotec to distribute Fujitsu’s DL-series serial dot matrix printers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, adding to the exclusive arrangement it already had in the Americas.

Its current website groups the products into four families: the P8000 line matrix printers, in cabinet, open pedestal and zero-tear versions; serial dot matrix printers, including its own S809 and S828 and the Fujitsu models; colour LED printers, the same LP654C and LP844C that the 2022 announcement called laser printers; and coding and marking printers. It also sells ribbons under the SmartRibbon name, offers a genuine ribbon verification service, and offers PrintNet Enterprise, network software that English Wikipedia says was launched in 2007 to manage line matrix printers from a single computer.

The company’s industries pages name airports, automotive and manufacturing, fast-moving consumer goods, food and beverage, and transportation and logistics. Its tagline on the home page is plain: industrial printers, supplies, parts and service, offered with rental, leasing and maintenance contracts.

For a design guide, Printronix shows how one name can outlast a company’s division into two. Compare TSC Printronix Auto ID, the Taiwanese company that bought the thermal line in 2016, and Zebra, one of the barcode printer groups VDC Research named in its 2015 note. For this guide we use a graphite and a signal green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Printronix’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.