This little printer is the printer of the future with the capability of being “portable.” It is considered portable because it can be moved from one computer to another one in the office without having to install any software before it can be used. This is a very neat idea but the price also goes up quite a bit also.
The Brother PT-1230 is very light and easy to handle. It can be run with six A3 batteries or with an optional power adapter but neither one of these are supplied. The PT-1230 label printer comes with P-touch Editor Lite software that enables you to design labels. If you are running this label printer from the batteries then it will automatically shut off after twenty minutes of time being idle to save power.
The Brother PT-1230 PC label printer will not print address labels but only the continuous labels that are up to 12mm wide. You can use the Windows fonts along with symbols and images and this printer also enables alpha-numeric sequential numbering.
Because this printer is so handy and portable you will lose your printing speed. Its speed is about nineteen seconds to print the letters of the alphabet so that is 26 letters in nineteen seconds. Its resolution is 180 dpi which is still readable.
The P-touch Editor Lite software is only available when the printer is being used because it is on the printer not on the computer. The printer has to be plugged into the USB socket and has to be switched on. It is treated like a portable drive. The file that you need to be familiar with is PTLITE10.EXE just in case your operating system doesn’t launch it automatically or you need to re-launch your software again.
You do not have to enter the size of the label you are printing because your PT-1230 automatically detects the size of the label. You can download more useful software called P-touch Editor 5.0 but you will be limited to one computer because it will be downloaded to the computer and not the printer. In this case, you lose your feature of being portable.
You are not allowed database connectivity with this label printer and software. Images can be imported in the ten most common file formats, though. You can also import images in ten types of frame, fifteen languages, in bold, underline, or italics, which you can rotate or reverse.
It might seem that leaving the PT-1230 label printer permanently connected to the computer would simplify matters but it doesn’t. If it is switched off it will give the “Unsafe Removal of Device” error. There are more criticisms also. The cutter is equipped with an anti-jam sensor and it will shut down the printer when it is activated. If the cutter is disturbed in any way it will shut down the printer also causing the same error to be reported. This error can cause your computer to crash or cause you to lose very important data. So be careful to shut down the hardware safely.