Brother P-Touch 1090

A little like a hefty calculator in appearance, if you are looking to create labels that are suitable for both indoor and outdoor use this model may be ideal for your requirements. It is equipped with a great array of features and options to create labels that are stylish and durable.

The Brother P-Touch 1090 comes in at 0.7 cm x 20.1 cm x 5.7 cm and weighs 365g. A good deal of the weight comes from the six AAA alkaline batteries that are required to power it, and unfortunately I discovered that despite there being an army of them, these batteries do not last as long as I would have liked. Battery life depends on a number of factors in this instance however; the features you use on the machine, how extensively you make use of its memory capacity, storage of the device and how often you use it. The memory feature is particularly useful, being as you can store up to nine different label designs at once, but you will probably find that calling up these designs fairly frequently will impinge on the battery life.

Aesthetically the P-Touch 1090 has a black plastic 'face' with white plastic casing down the sides. The LCD screen is of adequate size and the keyboard is ABCD type instead of the QWERTY type I would prefer. This takes some getting use to, but the keys are not so small you are prone to making too many errors, so this goes some way to compensate for the keyboard's layout. The features dial in silver is central to the device, and you can easily navigate this. You can choose to delete text and move backwards and forwards through it.

The only font available is Helsinki, but unless you are uber conscious of style in your label experimentation, the limited options will not be too problematic. You can, however, experiment with many different effects and styles. These include: Bold, italic bold, italic outline, italic shadow, normal, vertical, outline, shadow and italic. As the labels are laminated they are ideal for outdoor use too, and will adhere well to many surfaces, particularly glass and plastic. With a print speed of around 10mm per second you can churn them out fairly rapidly, too.

As well as the device itself the package comes with a thermal transfer roll and b-PAC SDK label printing software. This allows you to combine images, symbols, barcodes and logos into your designs, and the user is prompted at every step during this process.

I was very surprised by the array of features available on this model. For a product priced at just under £30 it is very versatile indeed. Some of the more advanced options take a bit of practice to achieve and you may find that you waste some tape at the beginning, but once you adjust to the design of the machine you will soon find that you can create tasteful labels with very little effort.