Brother P-Touch QL-500A

Advantages: Lots of extra functions, nice carry case
Disadvantages: mains operated, expensive

...With the demise of the office dymo, it was time to purchase a new labelling machine here at work. We knew what we wanted. We knew the advantages and pitfalls of the Dymo and opted for the Brother P-Touch 2100VP. Firstly, the Brother label printer comes in a handy carry case. Great for carting it around the office. Inside the rigid grey plastic case is the printer itself, its power supply and spare labelling reams. Possibly its only shortcoming is the Dymo was quicker and easier to use as it was battery powered and therefore did not require plugging in for a quick one off label. One massive advantage with the Brother device is that the keys (although small) are arranged in a true QWERTY layout. The Dymo took as long a time to find the letters as it did to finally generate, initiate and finally print the label! The build in LCD screen... Read review

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Advantages: Easy to use, create professional looking labels
Disadvantages: Limited design flexibility, poor quality graphics reproduction

...The P-touch 2420 seemed to offer the best combination of functionality and cost in a PC-enabled label printer, although this op does not provide a comparative analysis of other models on the market, as the 2420 is the only one I've tried... THE BASICS It should be clarified that this is a THERMAL MONOCHROME printer - don't be misled by colourful marketing blurb promising 'colourful labels'. The only possibility of introducing colour is by changing the tape that you print onto. To be fair there is a range of tape options (all supplied separately by the manufacturer), which allow the printing of black graphics and text on white, red, yellow, green and transparent coloured backgrounds. The tape, as I refer to it, is a cartridge of self-adhesive PVC (slightly thicker and tougher than sellotape) specially designed to provide the medium... Read review

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Advantages: Network Printer
Disadvantages: I can think of none - update 09-Jun-07 - There are none.

...if the colour was ok… you tell it no, and the machine goes ahead and cleans the colour print heads. The bumf tells us that from the black cartridge we can expect up to 500 A4 pages @ 5% coverage, and the cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges are expected to give us 400 A4 pages @ 5% coverage. Paper is loaded at the bottom via a pull out paper tray. The paper tray has a capacity of 100 sheets. Double sided printing is not supported. If you should want to print on both sides of a sheet, the side you want the print to appear on should be placed face down with the top of the sheet facing into the machine. The Brother DCP-310CN is neither the fastest nor the quietist printer but I cannot fault the quality of its output. *** UPDATE 09 June 2007 *** Network drivers for Windows Vista are now available. Before Vista drivers became avalable, I had... Read review

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