Product Reviews

Who needs a label printer? Surely they're just a luxury you can bypass with a sheet of labels in your regular A4 printer? Well, not quite, particularly if you need to print individual labels to a variety of addresses. Dymo has built up a good range of paper label printers and another of plastic tape printers, but the LabelWriter Duo is the first product to combine both in a single printer.

Looking a bit like Boba Fett's Slave I ship from Star Wars, the printer has a hinged, smoked plastic dome over a conventional paper label spool. More fun, though, is the button on the front, which prompts a powered tray to slide out so you can snap in a tape cartridge. It's a good way to impress geeky office-mates. Both labels and tape auto-feed once they're loaded.

Printing from Mac OS X up to version 10.4 is no problem. You can use the specialist Dymo Label Print software for label and tape design, which offers full font and style tweaks, numerous barcodes, including mail barcodes for US addresses, and the facility to include graphics for logos.

There's a built-in address list, too, so you can pick and print labels without having to type the details each time. For Leopard, you'll need to download the latest version 7.8 of the Label Print software. Even then, we had trouble getting it to show both label

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print and tape print editing screens. It looks as though Dymo still has a bit of work to do on this.

You don't have to use the dedicated application, as any text in Word or row of cells in Excel can be selected and printed as an address via a pop-up tool, installed with the rest of the software. It's all very easy - Dymo targets convenience as its main selling point.

The quality of the labels and tapes is fine: good dense black on bright white media, although colours are also available. Supplied as standard are a roll of large address labels and a cartridge of 24mm white tape. Being thermally printed on paper, labels will fade after a year or so if left in the light, but Dymo claims the plastic tapes are lightfast. Since labels are generally used for mailing, there shouldn't be any life span problems.

Labels vary in cost - they appear most expensive from Dymo, so shop around. The cheapest prices we could find for the two media supplied with the LabelWriter Duo were £10.50 for 520 labels and £11 for a 7m cartridge of tape This gives costs of 2p per label and 16p for a 10cm strip of tape. There are plenty of different label and tape styles to choose from and a useful swatch-style catalogue is supplied with the LabelWriter Duo.

This is fair, since A4 label sheets for a regular inkjet or laser printer cost about 40p per page from a high street stationery store, plus about 3p for toner or ink. The equivalent cost using this device works out at about 28p. But that's not what the Dymo LabelWriter Duo is about. It's designed for the convenience of being able to print a single label without having to break out of the software you're using, load label sheets into your printer and reuse the same label sheet multiple times, to print all the labels on it. If you're involved in regular mailings or filing, this little double-function device could be a real boon.