label printer recommendation

go with the king.

iirc, the UPS labels are 4x6, and back when they provided the printer they sent a Zebra. Since then we've had three other Zebras (two small-core and one large-core high-speed) and found them charmingly simple to use. However, these are thermal labels: is that what you're looking to print?

for a tennis racquet and the like I'd go with something like a Brother P-Touch. For UPS I'd go Zebra. Both are thermal (actually I think the P-touch is thermal transfer but could be wrong), but the label stock is quite different. You could possibly get just the one printer for all of it, but it's not something I'd go for, because thermal labels tend to fade over time.

We use a Zebra printer (TLP-3844-Z) for the bottom labels of an electronic device we build. We liked the Zebra because it was relatively cheap, supposedly high resolution, easy to program, relatively high quality, and we could get custom-sized labels for it. There are lots of different label materials offered, and many of them are pretty tough and chemical resistant. Best to get a sample, and abuse it yourself to see if it will work for you. It's almost everything we had hoped it would be except: 1. It's slightly lower resolution than its specs indicate because it doesn't lay down ink too uniformly. Some things get smudged together. We altered our label design to deal with this. 2. When it prints lots of labels (like 500 at a time), the increased heat of the print head makes print progressively lighter --- the blacks kind of turned grey. We solved this by letting the printer rest every 10 or 20 labels so it had time to cool off. This may be caused by the label material we use. 3. It's pretty smart when it runs out of labels, and will pick up where it left off seamlessly after you refill it. It is completely clueless when it runs out of ink, and will keep on printing. So we have to watch it every so often when we print labels. It's pretty wasteful of ink, too. 4. The model we got doesn't have a tray to catch the labels coming out, so it kind of spews them all over the floor in one long stream, and someone has to roll it up when it's done. We didn't like any of the label design programs that support the printer, so we wrote our own script to output what we needed in the printer's programming language. It's pretty easy to use actually. Also, we can print from Windows or Linux, and do the kind of automation we need done. For example, we have a web front end on our script, and the production people can print out labels for themselves through that inferface. It works fine for what it is, and unless you spend tons more money, I don't think you can do appreciably better. --Andre

hws,

For the UPS shipping label, I'd just use a regular laser printer, and print it out on a letter-sized page and fold it in half. That may not be too cost-effective if you ship a lot. I'm not sure --- UPS just gives us a whole shipping system here with a printer, so I may not be the best person to answer this question.

For the tennis rackets, the Zebras will be fine, and there may be a stock label size that will work for you. There are lots of different label types and glue types, so you can get water resistance (something a regular desktop inkjet doesn't do well at all), as well as backing glue that's not too tenacious.

We also needed fancier control over our label printing because we print serial numbers, so we had to keep track of that. If you're printing out small volumes, and the unique info is something you enter by hand (customer name, string weight, etc.), then one of the ready-made label programs that work with the Zebra ought to be good enough. If possible, I'd try to get a trial or some kind of money-back guarantee. The Zebras aren't super expensive, but we paid around $1500 for everything, and that's not too trivial.

--Andre