TOOLS: Brother QL-550 label maker

Our favorite tools have a new home on the wiki. Each week we’ll muse a bit about one of them. Have your own tool review? We’ll post that too!

Sometimes it’s the small things that bring you joy. That’s definitely the case with this spiffy little label maker. It does one thing, and it does it well: it prints labels.

We don’t sell anything, so we don’t printing shipping labels all day, but we do mail lots of PCBs and business stuff.

For a while we suffered inkjet labels, but less than half of them turned out. Out of total frustration we started trolling classifieds and auctions for a label maker. Brother was our preferred brand because it has some degree of Linux support. We went with the QL-550 because it was $35 at a business bankruptcy auction, but any model would have been fine.

Labels are quite expensive, probably 10 cents each, but the convenience is worth it for a business. You can save money buying loose rolls on eBay, but we haven’t run out yet. So far the included roll has lasted through a year of Free PCB Sundays and light business administration.

The included software is poor and you have to enter a serial number to download updates, but we do use it regularly. You can also use the label maker as a normal printer from any app, which is interesting when you forget to swap printers in Eagle.

We consider this one of our best investments ever, but that probably says more about how much we hated inkjet label sheets.

There’s more tools too.