COLUMNISTS As my family’s resident “pack rat”, I know a thing or two about clutter, as my wife will attest. But even pack rats can be organised, and managed clutter is a lot easier to deal with than disorganised mess. So I have set myself the challenge of sorting out and labelling the contents of the two rooms in our home that I call my own – the garage/workshop and my home office/technology cave.
Now that I am nearing completion of phase one of the makeover – sorting out the contents of my home office using black metallic shelving and transparent plastic crates – I decided to take a closer look at my labelling options. The cheapest option is to use paper, pen and sticky tape but, if you have handwriting like mine, it may not be the neatest option. What I needed was a label printer.
As I quickly discovered, there are three main manufacturers of label printers, Dymo, Brother and Seiko and all offer a similar range of products. These include portable handheld label printers with built-in keyboards that print on to ribbon-style plastic tape and desktop printers that are designed to hook up to a PC and print labels using reels of self adhesive sticky paper labels.
Handheld label printers, such as the Dymo LabelManager 220P, which costs £40 from Amazon, are ideal for creating small labels for use in the office and kitchen, labelling the contents of storage jars, folders or shelves (they are usually small enough to fit on to shelf edges).
The 220P comes with a typewriter-style “qwerty” mini-keyboard designed to be operated BlackBerry-style with two thumbs. It can use 6mm, 9mm or 12mm tape widths, is powered by six AA batteries or a mains AC adaptor and weighs just 300g.
In contrast, desktop label printers such as Brother’s QL-550, which prints up to 68 62mm wide labels per minute, or Dymo’s LabelWriter 400, are designed to sit on a desktop and function as PC peripherals in much the same way as a regular printer. Most use thermal printing techniques and rolls of labels of different sizes.
I particularly like the LabelWriter 400, which costs about £72: like other members of the Dymo LabelWriter family, is fast and easy to use and avoids the need to tie up a regular printer PC and fiddle around with label sheets.
The Dymo software bundled with the printer gives users the ability to produce sophisticated labels with images, logos or even barcodes if required and delivers 300dpi (dots per inch) print quality on labels up to 60mm wide. In fact, Dymo actually sells 17 different types of adhesive labels for use in the machine.
It prints between 40 and 55 labels a minute, integrates with Microsoft Office and comes with add-ins for Word, Excel, Outlook, Corex Cardscan, Palm Desktop and contact managers such as Act and Goldmine. This makes it great for small business and home office users who want to print out address labels for envelopes or packages in addition to labels for organisational purposes. Set-up is easy – the printer connects to a PC using a supplied USB cable, and it works with both PCs and Macs (minimum system requirements are Windows 95 or a Mac OS X.1.2 or later). Dymo also sells a version of the LabelWriter 400 called the 400 Turbo that prints at 55 labels per minute and has several other features including the ability – in the US – to print standard internet postage labels.
In the US, the company also sells a Desktop Mailing package, which includes everything you need to address, weigh and stamp your mail. The $240 kit includes Dymo’s LabelWriter Twin Turbo printer, which holds two rolls of labels at the same time so you can print address and postage labels without having to switch rolls, and a USB-connected postal scale for objects weighing up to 5lb. To operate the scales, simply connect them to your computer, place an envelope or package on the scale, select the class of postage and the bundled software will indicate exactly how much postage is required and print the correct stamps.
I have been using the Desktop Mailing package to print out postage for my eBay auction sales as well as labels to help me organise my home office and garage contents. Unfortunately, however, the kit is not available in Europe, although Dymo sells the Twin Turbo printer on its own for £122, which enables users to load two different sized label rolls, thereby avoiding the need to switch rolls all the time.
I also plan to use my LabelWriter to print out the address labels for the Taylor family’s next batch of Christmas cards – perhaps we will even manage to post them on time this year.
Paul Taylor answers your high-tech queries at www.ft.com/gadgetguru
