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When I say ‘toy’ I mean that it’s not a professional label printer that you would choose for a work setting. It’s very slow and the labels are eye-wateringly expensive. It’s designed for the hobbyist and for occasional use, but in that role it’s delightful.
It’s s thermal printer, which means that no inks are involved. Rather cleverly the label material is impregnated with chemicals that produce a different colours, based upon the temperature that’s applied to any particular pixel. So the print head delivers heat to areas of the label at different temperatures as dictated by the image that the you have used in your design. This does, however, mean that printing is slow. It also accounts for the high cost of the label rolls.
But you can produce labels with full colour images, but don’t expect high-resolution pictures of the quality you’d get from a photo printer.
The smartphone app has a library of clip art and a respectable selection of fonts, together with a range of background patterns that you can apply. You can also use your own photos, which you can select from your picture library on your phone. Theoretically you can also use GIFs with transparent backgrounds so that you can create your own clip art, but I have found this to be hit and miss. Some GIFs I have created in Photoshop overlay perfectly with transparent backgrounds and others (frustratingly) come in with white backgrounds even though they’re created in exactly the same way.
The app itself is pretty good (I’m using the IoS version) but it lacks a couple of a features that are pretty basic.
Some missing features are:
o The ability to flip a clipart item horizontally so that you can place them at either end of an image to make a ‘bookend’ layout.
o The ability to import your own art into the library so that you can reuse it easily.
o The ability to create custom folders into which you can place your saved labels.
The colours, in particular with photographs, are acceptable but not very accurate. Browns, in particular, appear to be muted, but again anyone trying to produce proper photos on this is going to be disappointed. There are videos on YouTube showing uses that this printer can be put to, such as producing components for art projects. I am using it for several purposes and am finding it rewarding and fun to use.
If Brother put some more effort into making the app more fully-featured that would be a great improvement, but it’s by no means bad as it is. But overall the app is very useable. It uses your home WiFi to connect your smart device to the printer, and you can also connect it to your Windows PC or Mac via a USB cable and then use Brother’s P Touch application to produce your content.
Overall I like this system very much and am having too much fun with it for my wife’s liking. I think she’s worried she’ll come downstairs one morning and see labels like ‘Kettle’, ‘Toaster’, etc on the household appliances.
| Marque | Brother |
|---|---|
| Couleur | Blanc |
| Type de produit | Imprimeur |
| Connexions | Wi-Fi |
| Caractéristiques spéciales | Prêt pour la mise en réseau |
| Disponibilité des pièces détachées | Information indisponible sur les pièces détachées |
