This little label printer has given portable a new meaning. It can be plugged into any computer at the office because it doesn’t work with software to be installed but you will pay for this “portable printer” convenience which is for sure.
The Brother PT-1230 is lightweight and so easy to handle that it is a cinch to move it around the office as needed. The label printer can be run with an optional power adapter or six A3 batteries but neither is included with this label printer. The label printer will automatically shut itself down after twenty minutes of idleness in order to save power. The designing software that comes with it is called P-touch Editor Lite.
This PT-1230 PC is not an address label printer. It prints continuous labels that are as big as 12 mm wide and will use Windows fonts of all mixed sizes but requires multiple lines. This printer can also print symbols, and images, and alpha-numeric sequential numbering.
Because of the size of this PT-1230 PC label printer, it doesn’t have a very fast speed of printing. It takes nineteen seconds to print all the letters of the alphabet and this is close to the estimated maximum speed of the printer. The text is readable with a print resolution of 180 dpi.
There is a manual cutter but if you print a large amount of labels then the printer can insert a marker that will show where the cuts should be made.
There is no Desktop shortcut for this label printer because the P-touch Editor Lite software is only available when the printer is plugged into the USB socket and turned on. The software is very simple to use though because it automatically detects the size of the label that you have in the printer. There is a small display window but it can be enlarged if required. The features are not too great on the P-touch Editor Lite but you can download P-touch Editor 5.0 from the Brother website, but it has to be downloaded to your computer not the printer. Downloading this software to your computer limits its capability of being portable any more.
Images can be imported in the ten most familiar file formats that is also supported by this printer. Ten types of frame, fifteen languages and printer bold/italics/underline, mirror image, or rotate are all things that are supported with this Brother PT-1230 PC label printer.
When you finish your printing, you cannot simply switch this printer off, you have to go through the “safe to remove hardware” process as you have to do with the memory stick. If you choose to shut down before safely removing hardware you could be asking for trouble. This could crash your computer or cause you to lose very important data. Vista and XP are less apt to cause your computer to crash or lose data if you switch off without safely removing hardware but to be on the safe side be sure to always safely remove your hardware.