Brother Takes Bother from Printing Labels

Looking for a quick and easy way to print labels? If so, Brother may have a good solution for you. It's the QL-570 Label Printer, a nifty little gadget that works pretty well as advertised.

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Now, printing labels hasn't been a difficult task traditionally, if you have a conventional printer and use Microsoft Word or similar products. But in my experience, using such applications requires you to run an entire page of pre-sized labels through your printer, even if you only want to print one label. This can leave you with partially-used sheets that can be a real pain in the rear to re-use. For example, it can be a challenge ensuring you don’t end up printing to part of the sheet where the label may have been used already, as can remembering which side of the sheet to put face up in the printer tray. If nothing else, I get tired of having to keep track of the partially-used sheets of labels that litter my office (I prefer littering my office with other things!). But Brother's little $99 QL-570 label printer parks on your desk (or wherever else you want to stick it) and lets you print as many labels as you want, in various sizes and configurations, incredibly quickly and very easily. Brother is aiming the little critter at small and home-based businesses, which seems about right: I stuck it on my home office desk, where its footprint is only about the size of a Blu-ray disc box. I rarely need to print out labels, but for those times when I need to send something by snail mail the Brother lets me create “to” and “from” address labels that look professional – a nice change from my previous methodology of either a) scrawling the information in my virtually illegible handwriting (and hoping for the best with the post office) or b) going through that rigmarole of using Microsoft Word and sticking a (usually) partially-spent sheet of labels into the manual feed tray of my printer. Hand writing is work enough, but using my laser printer means I have to get up out of my nice, comfortable chair and actually walk over to the printer (horrors!). It also means I have to keep different sized labels around for different sized jobs, adding to the mess in my office. 
The Brother changes all that. I love the new convenience and efficiency of the QL-570: besides printing mailing labels, I've used it to print stickers for DVD's and CD's I've burned, for labeling file folders and doing other mundane "office stuff identification" tasks where I'd usually just scrawl the info onto the thing's surface and never be able to read it again afterward. My wife likes the QL-570 too, and uses it more often. She runs a home-based business and needs to put her contact info onto a plethora of product catalogs every couple of weeks. Before, rather than shell out for blank labels (she's very, er, "fiscally efficient") she'd just assemble 'em into a table in Word, print 'em out on a blank piece of paper, cut 'em up and tape 'em onto the catalogs by hand. That's a lot of work, all things considered. Now, thanks to the Brother and its software's mail merge capacity, she just updates her source .CSV file, loads the Brother's software, and presses "print". Presto! Within seconds, perfectly sized and cut individual labels are spat out onto the desk, ready to be stuck onto the catalogs. Why, it's just like magic! The QL-570 connects to your computer (PC or MAC) via USB, like just about everything else these days and comes with "P-Touch Editor" and "P-Touch Address Book" software. Both apps work fine, though for our uses we only need the Editor. The label design software has three modes: Snap (which you can use for adding screen captures), Express (for quick and simple label creation – the one we use almost always) and Professional (for creating custom designs). It's intended to work seamlessly with applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook. And it does, though not perfectly. If, for example, you're writing a letter in Word 2007 and have the person's address at the top, you can just highlight the address and go to "Add-ins" tab. From there, click on "Brother P-touch" and the P-Touch Editor software loads and dumps the highlighted text right into a blank label. The "not perfectly" part means you may have to do some formatting at this point (for example, you may have to change the font size to fit the label), but on the whole it works just fine. Of course, you could just copy and paste the text from one app to the other, but where's the excitement in that? The QL-570 features a three color LED display above the label output slot (with three little buttons around it for operation) and Brother says its print technology requires no ink or toner.  It also prints at up to 300 x 600 dpi resolution (“superfine” mode) which makes it suitable for creating labels that include logos or other graphics. Within reason; this is no photo printer. Brother claims the unit will print up to 68 labels per minute, which must approach something like warp speed! The labels come either as pre-sized die-cut or continuous label rolls. I've been using the continuous label roll and it works beautifully, now that I've figured it out. At first, though, when I set up the system, I printed out a couple of very long labels, forcing me to unplug the printer so it would "reboot" and stop spewing paper endlessly onto my desk. A quick trip through the product's documentation showed me the error of my ways and from then on my labels have been cut to their proper length. Brother says the "super-durable built-in auto-cutter is good for over 300,000 cuts. I'd hate to have been the person tasked with documenting that!         The QL-570 uses drop-in rolls of labels that come on their own reels, so changing them is child's play. Since there's no messing around with ribbons or cartridges, all you have to do is open the translucent plastic cover on the printer, remove the old roll, drop the new label roll into place and Robert's your parent's male sibling. Brother says the printer recognizes the label roll size automatically and changes its settings accordingly.  Everything you need to get going is in the box, including the software CD-ROM, a USB cable and starter label rolls. Brother's label printer line also includes the entry-level QL-500 (about $70) and the top of the line QL-1060N (about $300), the latter of which is networked and can use up to four inch wide labels. I hadn't expected to really give a hoot about a printer such as this, but now that I've been using it for a few weeks I can't imagine not having it around. Maybe it's true that the simple things in life are the most important….