Brother QL-700 High-Speed, Professional Label Printer

great buy. really cheap. works great.

Heres the thing, once the printer is up and running, its great! For the money, I cant believe how well these have performed. It does exactly what we need it to for our business and thats why we now have 7 of them and, as we need more, will continue to order this same printer. Our first one was ordered over 3 years ago, is heavily used daily, and still works like the brand new ones. BUT! (and its a big but) The setup/installation for this printer (specifically on Windows 8, I cannot speak to other operating systems) was ANYTHING but intuitive. In fact, if I hadnt had someone walk me through it who had already done it, I know I would have had to resort to calling customer service. Which happens to be one of my least favorite activities in general. I will avoid it at all costs. So, let me outline what I have now learned so that maybe you too can be so lucky to avoid that dreaded call... Again, this is specifically for Windows 8: Go to http://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadtop.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=lpql700eus&src=download Click through the onscreen options to download the driver. Once the download appears in the lower left-hand corner, double click the file, named something like qd700w640av64us.exe. In the dialog box, click unzip. It should give you another dialog box claiming the 44 files were unzipped. ... then nothing happens... SO! Click on the Windows icon, bottom left of your screen, which brings up your awesome (sarcasm) Windows 8 home screen. Start typing brother to search your computer. It will default to search everywhere, change that to files You should now have a list of all of those files you previously unzipped. Scroll through and find the file named D_SETUP Double click and NOW you can follow the on screen instructions to finish the installation. Be cautious to follow the plugging in & powering on instructions exactly as they say. Then you should be golden! This printer is definitely 5 star, but one star lost for pretty poor setup process. Hopefully this helps!

I bought this in 2016. When I plugged it in, it acted like a flash drive and had a ready-to-use program called PKLITE10.exe. I ran it and it would not print communication error. This was on a windows 7 machine. I moved the printer to each of several computers/laptops in my house, and none worked until I got to the last one, my server, which was running Server 2012. It printed fine. So I left it connected to that machine and used it weekly, sometimes several times a week. The software is so simple to use, and in my opinion as a software developer with over 30 years experience, very intuitive and simple.... So I upgraded my server to 2019 because it was time :-) --- and now it doesnt print. It just says printer communication error. Just like when run on windows 7, etc... Here is how I solved the problem, and it now works with every computer in the house. The program PKLITE10.exe, on the built-in disk of the printer was dated approximately 2011. This version only works up until windows XP and does not seem to work with 7, 8, 10, or 11. I had to update the printer with a later version of the built-in software. I downloaded it from Brother, ran the transfer program, and it updated the printer. Sooo, if you want to update yours, here it how I did it. Go to brother and find the QL700 downloads page and scroll to the bottom and download P-touch Editor Lite Update Tool. run the program. If you get an error, hold down the little button on the printer next to the power button until the LED goes OFF. then re-run the program. Click the transfer button to transfer the new software to the printer. Mine took about 45 seconds. Then it said Successful. I unplugged the USB cable an held the printer power button to turn it off. Then turned it back on and plugged in the cable. If the little LED to the left of the status LED is NOT lit, hold down the little button under it until it lights. This enables the lite mode which means the printer acts like a flash drive as well as a printer, and the window pops up that has the printers built-in software. Note that the date of the PKLITE10.EXE file is now a lot more recent. Mine is dated 1/28/2015 it used to be dated 2011 or thereabouts. Anyway, the printer now works with any computer in the house, and does not require any software installation. Good luck and I hope this is useful to someone, took me hours and hours to figure out.

I really like how easy it was to get started. I love the way it is so simple to load new labels. I had a different label printer and had problems with it from the beginning. I am so very glad to have this product.

i recieved a product used, box damaged, cables scratched, machine dirty. im mad for this disrespect. i bought this product for out of the country so i cant return it back

They dont accept returns so make sure you order the right printer. Yay.

Im using this printer on a 2009 3.06 mhz Core 2 Duo iMac running OS 10.11.4. After downloading and installing the printer driver and utility software from Brothers web site, the computer wouldnt recognize the printer. It turns out that there is one further step. The printer appears as a mounted volume in the Finder, with an associated application named Start Here Mac. After running the application, a one-time procedure, the printer was then recognized. Section 4-3 of the setup instructions does highlight this step, but it was so unusual I overlooked it at first. Initially, printing of address labels was a little faint along the lefthand edge. A call to Brother tech support gave me a helpful suggestion - load the other, larger-size label spool into the printer and revert back to the smaller roll of address labels. This largely solved the problem, but some characters show mild distortion at 12-point size. Larger type sizes print more evenly. Its been several years, but my recollection is that a Dymo I had at work produced higher quality output. On the other hand, this printer is fast. Labels print instantly. Unlike the Dymo, the Brother cuts the labels for you, which leads to less problems than the tear-off system used by the Dymo. At only $40 on sale at Staples, the QL-700 was an excellent value. BUT- The Brother P-Touch Editor software is slow to launch and difficult to use. There is no direct way to set defaults with respect to margins and type size. However, the software does allow the user to save labels, so its pretty easy to use a saved label as a template, and set the softwares preferences to open the last used layout upon startup. I was disappointed by the mediocre support of this printer by Microsoft Word for Mac 2016. The address label size used by the QL-700 does not appear in the label sizes recognized by Words label printing function. Even when I created a custom label size, I was unable to print text in the same orientation as the label, and fiddling with Page Setup didnt help. With difficulty, I was able to create label templates as new documents in Word by manipulating settings in Page Setup for the QL-700. Unfortunately, somewhere in the process I managed to munge up Word such that any new 8½ x 11 documents I created had the header and footer areas cut off in the page display, and I had to click on the Insert Header or Insert Footer icon each time (or select View -> Header and Footer) to return to a normal display. I finally managed to fix this. I dont know what caused this problem, but I do know that everything was fine until I messed with the Page Setup settings for the QL-700. Anyway, everythings working properly now, but this printer is the antithesis of plug and play for Mac.

This printer works great! No ink required and quickly prints labels. Replacement rolls can be expensive but the quality is worth it. I would definitely buy again!

works like a dream

As of this review, I have had this printer for more than five years and it has ALWAYS performed flawlessly at printing both the standard size labels (DK-1201) and the wider labels (DK-2205). I have always used just the P-Touch software to manage my contacts / addresses and have made extensive use of adding the barcode at the bottom of labels when printing. In conclusion, I have nothing bad to say about this item.