Printing apparatus and printing system

This invention provides a low-cost, economical printing apparatus and printing system. For example, characteristic information of a printhead which is described, printed, adhered, or formed on a printhead or its accessory (e.g., a packaging paper box) in a format identifiable to human or an electronic device is man-machine-interactively inputted to a host (21) or electronically inputted to the host (21) by a barcode reader or the like. The printing apparatus discriminates whether or not a command sent from the host via an interface is a command that includes characteristic information of the printhead, and control is made to write the characteristic information of the print head into a non-volatile memory (1708) (EEPROM) in accordance with the discriminating result. The printhead (IJH) is controlled in accordance with the characteristic information written into the non-volatile memory (1708) to execute a print process.