Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/23/this-20-year-old-label-maker-i.html
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20 years ago? That’d be the year 2,000AD? I remember when 2,000AD was the sprocking Zarjaz future!
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I had one of those little ones, seemed to work okay, but I preferred the bigger one at the office that was manufactured in ~2001. Then I bought a new one at Costco in 2010, and hated the way that it maximized use of the tape. I chucked it and bought the 2001 model on ebay, and have been happily labeling ever since. They never seem to die.
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I have a PT-310 P-touch that’s at least that old. When I bought it, I considered getting the DC adapter as well, but decided to wait on that. I thought I’d see how long the batteries would last. It still works with the same batteries I installed when I bought it.
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I love how it prints two inches of nothing on either side of the label ensuring the tape be purchased twice as often as necessary.
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Have that same model… still works great! Only use it a couple times a year any more, but the $35 I spent on in 2002 was money well spent.
I’ve long wanted to get one of these, but the high cost of replacement tape always put me off. At least in this case there’s little risk that they’ll abruptly discontinue the form factor and effectively render the device useless. (Or is there?)
The old-fashioned Dymo widgets are still tantalizing as well.
Can you get third party tape for these things? The brother tape is outrageously expensive in the style of razors or printer ink.
I call that the profit margin… You can disable it by going deep into a menu, but after changing the batteries it’s magically back to having a massive margin.
Personally I super super super love this label maker, better in every way than every other label maker I’ve used:
And can print 1" (double the height) labels. Use generics:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FXBQSDH/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Incidentally, my PTD600 started printing lines on the labels, which I couldn’t clean off. Turns out it was a 3 year warranty! Brother shipped me a brand new one within a few days. And this was when the thing was probably 2 years old and beat to hell.
Nothing says retro-cyberpunk like keytops in dayglo green Dymo tape.
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