Brother P-Touch 1000 > Reviews > What a bargain

Author's product rating:   

Picture quality	Excellent
Printing speed	Fast
Colour sensitivity	Good
Ease of use	Easy
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Prints various sizes in great quality
Disadvantages:	Replacement tapes a bit pricey

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I use a lot of labels partly at work and partly at home so I was on the look out for a bargain. Lo and behold a stonker of one came along just by chance courtesy of Lidl stores.

As some of you may know Lidl have bi weekly bargains on offer throughout their chain of stores and as luck would have it this item was available for a fantastic price of just £9.99.

The unit is black in colour on all sides and the front face, but the rear of the printer is red. This does make it look slightly odd, but it is the printing that matters. It comes supplied with a black on white tape cartridge, which is 12mm wide and 8m long, so this should provide me with a lot of labels. It also is supplied with 6 AAA batteries for battery operation. It is possible to use a transformer but one is not supplied.

The instruction manual is brief but to the point and operation is very simple once you have got the basic idea. It comes preloaded with 2 fonts types Helsinki and Oklahoma, and it has 5 different font sizes. It has 10 styles if you count bold/italic and outline /italic as a separate style. Underlining is also possible whilst it also comes with some pretty neat frames 4 it total including the nice banner one. The length and Tab can also be changed or if you just simply want a label set to auto and get the basic print and style.

The machine can print on any TZ tape which is both laminated and of the thermal transfer type. The fonts have 300 characters which are easily selectable from the front keypad, obscure characters are obtainable by pressing the F function key and the letter associated with the symbol/character required. It can do mirror printing and repeat printing and also is pretty good at the vertical printing too. Once the printing is finished the tape is cut by the manual cutter fitted to the side of the machine, a simple button press completes the operation.

All operations are through the single line LCD screen and the keyboard which has a good tactile feel to it and the key presses are very positive. Once you have selected all your options you simply type in your text/characters and press the print button on the top right of the keypad. Adding a return into your text will enable dual line printing with the characters to the left printed on the top line and the characters to the right being printed underneath that, this also means of course that there is an automatic reduction in font size for 2 line printing.

All in all for my 10 quid I think I got a really good bargain, and one which will no doubt come in handy for numerous purposes around the house. One drawback is that the replacement tapes are a bit pricey at around £11 which seems silly since I could purchase the whole lot again for a tenner. You do get a lot of labels for your outlay depending on the length obviously. I am well pleased with my purchase and especially so with the quality of print and the adhesive properties of the tape. Once on they can be a bit hard to get off again, but that’s the whole idea isn’t it. There is a customer support centre but as off yet I have not required the use of it's services.