Brother P-touch Cube Review - Review 2022

Most professional person- and consumer-grade label printers (such as our Editors' Choice Blood brother QL-820NWB and the Dymo MobileLabeler, respectively) let you lot design and print labels from your computer and/or mobile device, but the Blood brother P-touch on Cube ($59.99) is the first one that nosotros've reviewed that cannot be tethered to a PC or a Mac via a USB cable. In other words, its but style of operation is connecting wirelessly to your iPhone, iPad, or Android mobile device. The skillful news is that the bundled Brother P-bear upon Design&Print app is elementary to apply, allowing yous to produce a diverseness of expert-looking plastic labels for your kitchen, garage, bedrooms, office, and schoolroom, making the P-touch Cube an like shooting fish in a barrel top selection equally an entry-level label printer for families, small workplaces, and classrooms.

Small, Sleek, and Simple

In add-on to our review unit with its white chassis, Brother offers the P-touch Cube ($57.99 at Best Purchase) in bluish. The label printer measures 4.5 by two.v by four.five inches (HWD) and weighs about an ounce-and-a-half short of a pound, which is similar to the Dymo MobileLabeler's dimensions of 5 by 2 by 5 inches and weight of just over a pound. In fact, aside from the P-touch Cube being a little wider, the two printers look quite similar—cube-shaped with rounded edges. Epson's LabelWorks LW-600P Portable Characterization Printer is (while like in size and weight), a bit taller than it is wider. All iii models are modest and light enough to easily accept with you.

Like the Dymo MobileLabeler ($38.99 at Amazon) , the Epson LW-600P, and the Editors' Choice Brother P-bear upon PT-700 ($129.95 at Amazon) , the P-touch on Cube can apply either Ac or battery ability. However, only the Dymo MobileLabeler comes with a rechargeable battery. To run without wall power, the P-touch Cube requires half dozen AAA batteries. Information technology can exist operated from an iOS or Android smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth, but the other 3 label printers also take USB ports for connecting to Windows PCs and Macs. Since nearly everybody with a pulse has a smartphone these days, however, the disability to connect directly to a reckoner isn't really much of a limitation.

Given that everything from designing your labels to press them out is controlled from a mobile device, the P-touch Cube has no control console. The power jack and power button are located on the back edge, and the manual cutter lever and output slot are on the front. On the left side, in that location's a small window that allows yous to see how much blank label tape is left.

The P-touch Cube uses sound-cassette-like tapes containing xvi.four- or 26.2-human foot spools of plastic tape in widths of about one-eighth, one-quarter, and one-half inch. (At that place are also a couple of cassettes with ix.8 feet of textile tape for creating atomic number 26-on labels.) Brother offers about thirty or then P-touch TZe-series label cartridges in several colour schemes, such as black on white, black on articulate, white on berry pink, blackness on pastel purple, golden on satin silver, and so on.

Setup and Mobile App

To go the P-touch Cube operational, you simply power it upwardly and drop in a bare label cassette. You can employ either the arranged ability cable, or load vi AAA batteries (not included). You lot install batteries past removing the cover on the correct side of the chassis, and the cassettes go under a embrace on the left.

You lot tin download the P-touch Design&Print app from either Google's Play Store or Apple'southward App Store. The P-bear upon Cube's mobile app isn't anywhere well-nigh as feature-rich and capable as Brother'due south own iPrint&Label app designed to work with the company's QL-810W and other QL-800-series professional-grade labelers, but then the P-bear on Cube isn't nearly as robust every bit those models, either. Even and so, for and then uncomplicated a device, P-touch Design&Impress's pattern features aren't that shabby.

The mobile app comes with numerous templates organized in categories, including Kitchen, Storage, Garage & Garden, Domicile Function, Occasions, and Identification, and it recognizes all the P-touch TZe-series labels and offers templates designed around the electric current installed label type'southward width and color scheme. You lot can also design your own labels, choosing from 450 symbols, more than sixty frame designs, and several fonts, including most of the Apple and Google font libraries.

In addition, P-touch Blueprint&Print utilizes helpful smartphone features, such as spell cheque and voice to text. In fact, deploying a smartphone (or tablet) app as the device'southward design center and command panel provides a much wider range of features and blueprint options than Brother could have easily (and economically) squeezed in to the P-touch Cube hardware itself.

Decent Print Times and Good-Looking Labels

Unlike Brother's QL-800-series label printers (and its competitors), which are designed to impress, amidst many other things, about 100 die-cut accost labels per infinitesimal (all with unlike addresses), the Cube and its ilk are relatively deadening, and since you tin can't design and print several labels with unlike content in succession—non without stopping to change the words, that is—how fast the characterization printer prints oft depends more on you than the car itself.

In this regard, comparison i machine's speed to some other fringes on an practice in futility, except, maybe, when printing only one label at a fourth dimension, or perhaps a few with the same content (i.east., copies). Even so, a man operates the cutting mechanism, which in plough initiates the printing of the side by side copy.

That said, I clocked the P-touch Cube as it printed a single 0.47-by-3.5-inch black-and-white label with the words PCMag: A Printer Test on it at nigh 7.5 seconds, and 10 of them in succession (again, I pressed the cutter lever when each label finished printing) in 67.vii seconds. That was about i second slower than the Dymo MobileLabeler for one label and vi seconds slower for 10.

The Epson LW-600P took xiv seconds for 1 label, and ten.seven seconds when printing the same characterization from an iPhone. But, again, the bottom line is that none of these entry-level label printers are particularly fast; as well, they're designed for printing one or two labels at a time, and then waiting for you to motility on to the side by side. Producing the labels from your smartphone, nonetheless, makes the procedure much easier (and faster) than the erstwhile-style labelers with a small-scale keyboard included in the control panel.

Let's face information technology: You lot can't get likewise fancy when your only design options are text (characters and symbols), frames, and backgrounds (and, well, yes, the various ii-colour label tapes spruce things up considerably), but the P-touch Cube's hard-re-create labels themselves come out looking quite good, with smoothen edges around frames, backgrounds, and the words. Continue in mind, though, that I was not able to check all label types and colors or all sizes, or all font and symbols at all supported sizes. I've no reason to suspect that they won't all look good, simply at the aforementioned time, I'm reasonably sure that some volition look (perhaps, in some cases, a lot) better than others.

Cost Per Label

Depending primarily on the length of your labels (and the length of the blank tape), the per-label cost varies greatly. Printing 0.47-by-3-inch labels on clear tape with black print will run y'all about 18 cents each; 0.47-by-three-inch labels with gold impress on satin argent cost nearly 23 cents each; and the same size with navy-blueish print on white fabric iron-on labels run 54 cents each—you become the idea. The longer the label, the more information technology costs. Buying your label cartridges in 2-packs volition relieve y'all a cent or ii per label.

Simplicity Is Productivity

Overall, the Brother P-touch Cube doesn't do anything different or perform that much faster than its entry-level competitors. In fact, that information technology doesn't come with a USB port for connecting to computers directly renders it a little less capable. If you demand the power to blueprint and impress labels from a desktop or laptop PC, the Epson LW-600P or the Brother PT-P700 are definitely better choices. Where the P-impact Cube excels is in its simplicity. You get from the box to printing labels in less than 5 minutes, and the P-touch Design&Print app is child'south play—for most characterization types, all you do is alter the text. That it's so straightforward and easy to use at such a reasonable price is reason enough to make information technology our new Editors' Choice entry-level, all-purpose plastic label printer for dwelling and home office use.

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Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/migrated-33102-printers/17647/brother-p-touch-cube-review

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