Dymo

Brought a label printer about 3 years ago from amazon was a great promo £50 with 3 different rolls of labels. Best buy ever make professional labels! I just wish they could find a way to print in colour. But the laser printing is a great cheap way to do prints in Black and while

A great label maker for the price and size. The tape isn't cheap but having now upgraded to a brother I'd not go back. The features are fair better and the tape can be cheaper to buy and have the option for heat shrink

I used to have the manual version of this machine, wherein you'd turn the mechanical dial and push down to print each character. With this machine, you key-in in what you want and the machine does the rest!

For twenty pounds there's not a lot to complain about. You have a choice of numbers and letters (lower and upper case), font styles and borders. Unfortunately, I find that the font style applies to the entire string, rather than to individual characters. This is a minor nuisance given the asking price.

If you intend on printing the same label several times, you can save the entry and recall it later for quick printing. I found this feature more useful than expected, because entering the characters can be quite time-consuming. Unfortunately, you can only store 9 entries. It's a minor limitation, but in 2007 (the date this machine was first available on Amazon UK) it seems like a rather anachronistic limitation.

In terms of general usability, the machine is pretty easy to operate. The keys are spongy and don't have a massive amount of feedback, and the colour of the numbers is very close to the colour of the soft keys, so they can be difficult to read in low light (Dymo, why not use orange so that the numbers stand out against the blue?).

The machine takes 4xAA batteries, which were not included with my copy.

Bottom line: If you need a label maker, just buy it.