Review on PT1290 Home and Office Label Printer by Brother by Carl Watkins

I've had other Brother labellers in the past so I have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Good things first: the tapes are easy to load; Gas stations are easy to find everywhere. The imprint is clear. The keyboard is good and the menu navigation is pretty good too. Now for the bad: The display is ALWAYS dark. It doesn't matter how good your batteries are. Which, by the way, requires 6 AAA. Serious? Why not two threes or a whole two? 6 damn batteries? Why not 100 tiny button cell batteries! And it's slow. Everything seems sluggish. It seems he always has dead batteries. Also, it always wastes tape. 1 inch in front at least. It doesn't matter what options you use, if you use the built-in cutter (which works really well, by the way), you're always going to waste ribbon. Now I assume some tape will be lost, 1/2 inch maybe even 3/4 inch but 1 inch is too much. And what's worse, it means you have to take a pair of scissors and cut the label by hand if you want it to look pretty. What's the point if you don't want it to look pretty you wouldn't be wasting your time on a labeller would you? Anyway, I think this product only deserves one star because it's a big step back from the previous, better (and completely discontinued) PT-65 model, they added a font and a bigger screen, but dropped other things that they already had, so they didn't make it better, they made it worse. It uses more tape, uses more batteries, and runs slower. So since there seems to be a new labeling model every six months, don't waste your money on this one. Find one of the others in the same price range that works a little oh better.