Dymo LabelWriter Duo 400

Excellent – I use my printer a lot for creating labels for sending eBay items right around the world. My labels contain my eBay store logo, store web address, and physical return address and phone number. It makes my parcels look very professional and like they’ve come from a big warehouse somewhere, and it also saves me a lot of time. We also periodically do a print merge with Microsoft Excel to produce name badge labels for school and church events. It tends to save organisers a lot of time. And the printers are portable enough to connect to a laptop at a big event too. If you’re looking at getting a thermal label printer, Dymo is definitely the way to go. The machine is very fast and produces very good looking labels in a small amount of time. It uses standard printer drivers too, so if you're looking for a printer to attach to Microsoft Access, MYOB, Word, Outlook, or Quicken, this printer is certainly something to consider. It can also accept rolls of thermal paper like a supermarket checkout printer, and it can attach to MYOB Retail Manager to instantly make a networked cash register. It can work with CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator to produce totally customised labels, name badges, mailing labels, vertical file labels, asset labels, and barcodes. The tape printer also prints on more permanent Dymo D1 and RhinoPro cassettes for labeling basically anything you like from electricity meter boxes through to kid’s lunch boxes. Since the printer connects via a USB2 cable to a computer, you’re not limited to a set of pre-loaded characters. If your computer doesn’t have the symbols you’d like, download another free set from the internet. Dymo has tried to change their thermal label refills again by adding a label scanner. It is a small reader that looks for a perforated hole in the paper and a black bar at set intervals on the back of the label backing. There are still aftermarket labels that work very well, but it means you need to be careful which thermal labels you buy. A printer with old firmware will print on any labels, but the newer models are very fussy and will tell you that they are out of paper. Genuine Dymo labels are very expensive, as are their D1 cassettes. Seven meters of D1 cassette tape will set you back around $42 at OfficeWorks. The RhinoPro cassettes are often more than this but offer the flexibility of printing on flexible tape, heat-shrink tubing, and permanent polyester. The other feature that bugs me is the D1 tape printer will “tension” the tape by forwarding the ribbon and forwarding the tape by around 20mm each time a different cassette is installed. So you’re basically consuming 20mm of tape even if you just wanted to change colour.