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 ...
craggybuk 05.09.2007 (31.08.2009)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Magicard Rio 2
Advantages: High quality ID badges. Disadvantages: Cost, quite slow
Introduction
Having used the Magicard Rio 2 badge printer for several years (see my review from September 2007) we, as a business decided we needed to upgrade as our architecture was changing and DLink were no longer making the DP-300U print servers which were the only print servers which would work with the Rio 2.
In general we were very happy with the Magicard brand so decided to stick with it and went for the Rios twin sister, the Tango 2e. The main difference between these 2 printers is that the Tango 2e now comes with a built in Ethernet port making it simple to connect to a network whereas this was a real tricky job with the previous models.
In the box
These printers are extremely heavy so the box is very well packed to avoid damage during transit. On removing countless layers of polystyrene, you finally reach ...
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. ...
alto trader
Hotel - 4261El CaminoReal, PaloAlto, CA94306, USA
Product Information for "Magicard Alto" »
Manufacturer's product description
Magicard Alto is a professional color ID card printer with card anti-copying security. The Alto is ideal for any environment, including company reception areas and hospitality applications. So small and light (only 7lb / 3.2kg), it is easily portable.
