Let’s address the elephant in the room. When you typed "high quality" into your search bar, you were either being optimistic or repeating the product listing. This is not a high-quality piece of industrial machinery. It is a clone. It is a "POS-5890" in disguise.

However, "high quality" in the context of this driver refers to the output, and surprisingly, it delivers. Once the driver is installed, the print resolution is genuinely impressive for a $20 device. The thermal head produces crisp, dark text without too much banding. QR codes? Scannable. Barcodes? Readable. If you are using this for shipping labels or receipts, the definition is sharp enough that you don't look like an amateur business owner.

Before diving into drivers, let’s appreciate what the ARP990KC is. This is a direct thermal POS printer, meaning it uses heat to create images on special thermal paper—no ink or toner required.

This is the most common mistake. If you plug the USB cable into your PC before installing the driver, Windows will automatically install a generic "USB Printing Support" driver. That generic driver will not work with POS software.

The ARP990KC is a common ESC/POS thermal receipt printer. For high-quality, stable printing, you do not typically need a proprietary "brand driver." Instead, you should use the generic EPSON TM-T88III driver (for Windows) or standard USB/Serial drivers (for Linux/Android).

If you have the specific OEM brand (e.g., Hoin, Xprinter, PosBang, or Metapace), the best driver is often provided directly by the reseller.

If the manufacturer site is down, use:

No proprietary driver needed. Use CUPS with the raw queue or the epson-escpr package.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install printer-driver-escpr
sudo lpadmin -p ARP990KC -m raw -v usb://dev/usb/lp0 -E