Brother P-Touch® QL-500 Printer

Pros: Inexpensive, fast printing, easy to use, time-saver

Cons: You have to use relatively expensive proprietary labels, but otherwise there are no major cons.

The Bottom Line: If you print labels often and are looking for ways to save time/money, the Brother QL-500 is a good place to start. I wish I had done it sooner!

Review: I own a business where we ship out customer orders everyday. We have to print shipping labels for each order. I tried to save money by using laser printer sheets, but it started taking too much time to set it up each time. I knew there were faster ways ...

Pros: Inexpensive, does not use up ink, easy to use

Cons: Main program a little cluttered in interface

The Bottom Line: Absolultely fantastic for printing all sorts of black-and-white labels.

Review: The P-Touch QL-500 is a label printer that connects to your Windows 2000 or XP PC (not sure if Vista is supported) and allows you to print custom labels with text and graphics. The labels will be printed on blanks sold by Brother but they are reasonably ...

Pros: Well-designed machine that turns out beautiful work. Supplies are reasonably priced.

Cons: Software hard to figure out, documentation abundant but hard to understand.

The Bottom Line: Not everybody needs a label printer, but nearly everyone can use one. If you're tired of hand-addressing boxes and envelopes, this is a rugged and practical solution.

Review: I've wanted a label printer ever since I first saw one many years ago. But the printers and (especially) the labels were always too expensive to be cost-effective, so I made do with other ways of addressing envelopes and packages. With this printer ...

Pros: Small, Fast, Quiet, Economical with the right type of labels

Cons: None

The Bottom Line: Get the generic labels to save money and have the perfect setup.

Review: I've been using this printer for about a month and have been left with nothing less than a warm a fuzzy feeling. It performs admirably with every type of label I've thrown at it so far with not so much as a single problem. If you sell on eBay and ...

Pros: Product is a huge time saver. Easily used by people who aren't computer smart.

Cons: The only downside is finding stores that carry the different sized labeling tapes.

Review: The QL-500 has saved our office over 100 hours in time spent hand addressing envelopes. We send out hundreds of calendars in December for the following year. Prior to owning this cute little machine, we did all of the addressing by hand. Which took ...

Pros: Prints professional looking labels & tapes; very fast; solidly built; installs easily; fairly inexpensive.

Cons: Software difficult to comprehend; confusing interface; expensive labels; no printed Software User's Guide.

The Bottom Line: The value of owning this machine is directly proportional to the NEED for owning it. If you print a lot of labels often then by all means buy one.

Review: I recently received the Brother P-Touch QL-500 PC Label Printer as a gift and I don't know why. I do not print a lot of labels for anything and certainly not a whole lot of them at one time. But being a bit of a gadget freak, I thought I would give this ...

Pros: Fast printing. Easy tape changes. Latest P-Touch software is fun to use.

Cons: Limited label selection. Poor rebate handling makes other label printers a better value.

The Bottom Line: Although it works well, look at Dymo for a better value, and wider variety of labels that is more readily available locally.

Review: Note that this printer only takes Brother DK tapes and the selection is somewhat limited. Changing tapes is a breeze. I've been using the continuous roll waterproof tapes and they work well, but are expensive and somewhat hard to find. The software on ...

Pros: Great printing. Good price.

Cons: The Mac Support SUCKS!!!!!!!!!

The Bottom Line: If you are a PC person this is worth a look. If you are a Mac person you need to look elsewhere.

Review: I purchased this printer a couple of days before (4/25/05) Mac OS X 10.4 hit the shelves. The printer was quite good at what it did until I received my copy of 10.4 on 4/29/05 (that is the day the OS was released). Granted much of the software was PC ...

Pros: Prints labels

Cons: bad software, customer support, doesn't honor rebates

Review: This prints labels just fine, however the software is proprietary and requires you to keep a separate address book just for labels if you want to use it properly. The program that supposedly works with Outlook is clunky and not particularly ...