Brother P-Touch® QL-500 Label 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.

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: 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.

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: Inexpensive, does not use up ink, easy to use
Cons: Main program a little cluttered in interface

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.

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: Great printing. Good price.
Cons: The Mac Support SUCKS!!!!!!!!!

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: Small, Fast, Quiet, Economical with the right type of labels
Cons: None

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: 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.

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

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 configurable.

Tech support STINKS!

Also, DO NOT BUY BASED ON REBATES!!! Brother is apparently one of the many companies that looks for any reason possible to deny rebates. After 6 months I finally got a postcard denying my rebate. I went back and looked at the paperwork and could not find a single error. All dates and info were as requested.

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.

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 several people with cramped up hands to accomplish. With this machine, I was able to copy and paste from MS Word to the program that came with the QL-500. I could change fonts and font size to make the labels look more professional. The entire project took me less than 90 minutes to complete. Also on the machine is a handy dandy cutter, so that after each label there is a straight cut. My favorite thing about this product is there are several different sizes of rolls of labeling tape to send through this machine. From something that would look proportionate on a large envelope to something for a number 9 envelope.