Restaurant billing ke liye kaunsa thermal printer lein — 58 ya 80 mm, USB, LAN ya Bluetooth.

A thermal receipt printer is a small heater and a paper roll. What makes it work with a billing software is not the brand, it is the language the software speaks to it — and almost every receipt printer sold in India speaks the same one, ESC/POS, the command set Epson defined and everyone else copied. If the listing says ESC/POS (it is on nearly every box, sometimes as "Epson compatible"), EasyKOT can talk to it, over whichever cable you choose.

What ESC/POS does not settle is the paper width, the connection, and whether the particular unit in your hands has a working cutter and a full roll in the right way round. Those are the four questions below, and the last one is a test you run yourself.

Why we publish no "works with" brand list. A name on a list is a promise we can only keep by testing that exact model, firmware and cable. So the list is your own printer and the test slip. The register asks you the paper width when you add a printer, prints a ruler across the full width, and tells you on the paper if the answer was wrong.

The trap is a mismatch, not a size: an 80 mm bill layout sent to 58 mm paper hard-wraps every long line, so a date like 06/09/2026 breaks across two lines and the total drifts. It happened on a real bill in September 2026, which is why the register now asks — the width is the one thing about a printer that no cable can reveal.

• LAN / Wi-Fi (network). The printer gets an address on your shop's Wi-Fi or a cable to the router; the laptop and the phones can all print to it. The best choice for a kitchen printer and for any shop with more than one terminal. The register finds it by scanning, and hunts for it by hardware address when the router renumbers overnight. Ask the router to reserve its address and it never moves.
• USB. Simplest at a single counter with a laptop: plug in, add, print. Needs the desktop register — phones cannot drive a USB printer — and a real data cable (a charge-only cable powers the printer and carries nothing, which reads as a dead printer).
• Bluetooth. For the phone register: an Android phone and a Bluetooth printer is a complete shop with no laptop. One printer pairs with one phone at a time — a second phone still holding the pairing is the classic "paired but silent" fault. iPhones do not print over Bluetooth to these printers, and Bluetooth from a laptop is built into the desktop register but unproven on our own machines — treat it as the phone's transport.
• Serial (RS-232). Older units and some kitchen printers. Built into the desktop register (you type the baud rate) but the least exercised of the four. Buy it only if you already own one.

Many units are sold with two of these (USB + Bluetooth, or USB + LAN) for a little more. If you can, buy the two-connection unit: it is the difference between a printer that follows you from a laptop to a phone and one that does not.

• ESC/POS on the listing. If it is not there, ask. "Epson compatible" means the same thing.
• Width you decided on above, and rolls of that width in the same order.
• The connection your shop needs — LAN for a kitchen or several terminals, Bluetooth for a phone, USB for one laptop.
• Auto-cutter if it is the bill printer at a busy counter. Tearing slips by hand at 9pm gets old.
• A cash-drawer port (RJ11) if you keep a drawer — the register kicks the drawer open through the printer on every settle. Most 80 mm units have it; many 58 mm units do not.

Marketplace listings on Amazon.in and Flipkart read on 7 September 2026, rounded to bands; prices move weekly and vary by seller. No brand is named on purpose — none is certified by us yet, and the test below is the only claim we make.

Add the printer in the register (it scans the network, or you type the address, or plug in USB, or pair Bluetooth), answer the paper width, and press Print test page. The slip carries a ruler of digits across the full width you claimed. If the ruler runs off the edge or stops short, the slip itself tells you which width to pick instead — in lines short enough to read on either roll. That is the whole compatibility test, and it is the only one that is honest about your printer, firmware and cable. The guide is connect a thermal printer.

What comes off an 80 mm printer: the exact bytes the register sends, rendered by a virtual ESC/POS printer. Amounts print as "Rs." because the rupee glyph does not exist in the character sets thermal printers use — deliberate, and what keeps a cheap printer from printing question marks.

When something goes wrong later — blank slips, garbage characters, offline after a router restart, prints once then stops — the register names the fault on the printer's row and links the fix, and each fault has its own page. A print failure never loses a sale: the sale is written before the paper is tried, the ticket retries for several minutes, and if it gives up it stays listed for a reprint instead of vanishing.