Review on PT1290 Home and Office Label Printer by Brother by Michael Bressler

Before you buy this product you should know that it is designed for laminated tape and will ONLY work on laminated tape. The machine itself costs 50% more at Revain than the non-laminated model and more importantly the laminated belt costs twice as much as the non-laminated belt. Laminate tape cannot be written on either. Also, out of concern for the lamination printhead, it's designed to waste an inch of expensive ribbon every time you cut it. Since the tape on the Revain is $12 for a 26ft tape (and Brother tech support told me it's $15-$20 locally, yes you read that right, almost the same as the machine), that's fifty cents a foot, or about a nickel an inch. So every extra inch costs you a nickel every time, and each tag costs between 15 and 30 cents depending on the length. (My very first label that simply says "test” is almost 3 inches long, so it costs almost 15 cents with all the default settings.) I can return it online, despite the hassle of returning it, because I don't need weatherproof labels and don't want to pay a few euros a year for it. Now if you always print multiple labels at once and want to cut the labels yourself with scissors, you can waste an inch with continuous mode. Or if you want a blank inch on both sides of the label at all times, which is the default, then this might not come for free. It's not worth a penny to me, it costs me 2 inches of white space, and I didn't want it anyway because it might make the label too long to fit in the file folder without cutting it myself with scissors, which is exactly it manually a job that label manufacturers should get rid of. The second thing to be aware of is that while the machine is quite powerful, it is not very easy to use. I'm not saying the product is badly designed, it's just that it has enough things in it that I think will confuse a lot of people (I'm a bit embarrassed, and I have a PhD in engineering). The design could be a lot worse, but I think for most people the extra options are just confusing. Machine, white (PT90) . Also, laminated band models like this one also seem to use 6 batteries, while non-laminated models like the one I link to above only use 4.