Magicard Alto

Advantages: Reliable, high quality outputs
Disadvantages: 30 seconds per badge, a little noisy

...--Background-- We have used Magicard badge printers for approximately 5 years now to produce ID badges for staff and students alike. We started off with a couple of the original white RIo printers and upgraded to the Rio 2 model 3 years ago. Since then we have bought 7 of these devices for our various campuses and print out on average 10, 000 cards per year. As well as standard printing, there are various other clever functions these printers can do such as produce holograms, write to magnetic strips should your cards have them and produce bar codes. --Whats in the box-- These things are not small and are also quite heavy. They come extremely well packed with thick polystyrene padding. As well as the printer, you get the mains lead, a parellel cable AND a USB cable, a drivers CD which also contains the user manual in... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: All-in-one keyboard, USB hub and laptop stand
Disadvantages: Heavy, and my example drew too much power from the USB port

...My first attempt to use this keyboard caused a high power demand error on the USB port of a Toshiba laptop. The Tosh isolated the port until I could fix the problem. The only way I could use Alto was to connect it to my laptop via a powered hub. Maybe this is just a faulty unit, but Logitech weren't much help - merely suggesting the corrective measures I'd already tried and then offered to sell me one of their power supplies for it. Moderately useful product IF you do a lot of serious typing on your laptop and want to use it desk-mounted. I'm not confident that it will see much use long-term. I've since returned Alto to the supplier and bought a simple keyboard and laptop stand.... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

Advantages: Link upto 3 printers on 1 IP address. Simple setup
Disadvantages: None

...Where I work, we have always purchased the HP Jetdirect print server devices. However, when we bought a whole load of Magicard badge printers we found out after several painful days that these only worked with the D-link DP300u print servers due to some strange setting within the printer. With this information, we were forced into buying the D-link blind with no time to do any background research or fact finding. The D-link is a 3 port print server, 2 ports are serial with the other being USB. This means that upto 3 printers can be attached to the print server at any one time. At the time we bought them, they were around £80 each. --Whats in the box-- The D-link print server comes in a very compact box with just enough room for the components. There is the print server itself which is nicely designed to comply... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful