Brother PT-1230 - The Perfect Home Office Companion
Brother PT-1230 - The Perfect Home Office Companion
This printer is apt to become a popular addition to the small business and home because of its "portable" capabilities. The price is somewhat higher than other label printers because of it being more portable but in most cases it won't stop small businesses from using it. The Brother PT-120 PC Label Printer is very easy to use and so lightweight and so convenient. It can be portable because the software does not have to be installed into the computer before the printer can be used.
This PT-1230 is powered by an optional power adaptor which is not supplied or you can use six AAA batteries which are not supplied either. In order to save power and be green, if you are using your batteries, the printer will shut itself down after twenty minutes of no use.
The PT-1230 comes with P-touch Editor Lite software to enable you to design labels. As mentioned before this software doesn't have to be installed on the computer but if you want more advance software you can download P-touch Editor 5.0. The downfall of this software is that you can no longer use the PT-1230 label printer as a portable, it will have to stay with the computer that the 5.0 software was downloaded on.
This label printer will not print address labels but will only print the continuous labels that area up to 12mm wide. It will use Windows fonts, images and symbols and also any combination of the fonts and print in multiple lines if needed. This printer allows alpha-numeric sequential numbering which can only be done in steps of one but you can pick your start and finish number and print multiple ones if you need to.
There is a downside to this Brother PT-1230 PC label printer because of its size the printing is much slower. It takes nineteen seconds to print the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. So that is a price you pay for the printer being portable but it doesn't seem to cause many to not buy it.
There is also a down side to the software because it is only available when the printer is plugged into the USB socket and switched on that there is not Desktop shortcut. So if you have an older version of Windows you will have to launch the software from the file PTLITE10.EXE. Most of the Vista and XP operating systems will automatically launch it when switched on but if there is a reason you need to re-launch it, you will also need to look for the above file name and double-click to start it.
The biggest criticism about this Pt-1230 made by Brother is that you have to go through the necessary steps to safely remove hardware or you may cause your computer to crash or lose important data. This is also a setback if the printer gets switched off, if the anti-jam sensor shuts the printer down, or if the cutter is disturbed while busy because it will generate this same error. So be very careful to follow the steps to safely remove the hardware.