Product Reviews

Brother's P-touch 9500pc is a label printer that prints to cassette tape-style media of different widths. The media comes in white and yellow, and the laminated labels are cut as they eject from the printer.

The 9500 prints to two types of Brother tape - HG and TZ - and accommodates tape widths of between 6mm and 36mm. Brother claims that TZ tape is 'one of the toughest labelling options available', as it's constructed from six layers of material and characters are printed onto the underside of a laminate cover. The laminate cover is designed to protect the labels from abrasion, chemicals, sunlight, extreme temperatures, oil and water.

Setting up the P-touch 9500 is no more complicated than installing the driver and application software, plugging in the USB cable, installing a cassette and plugging in the power. Getting it to print labels was more difficult, however. The problem turned out to be that the driver which comes in the box isn't compatible with Mac OS X 10.2. However, there's now an update on Brother's website, and with that installed we had no problems. Brother provides two applications to help create labels:

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P-Touch Editor and P-Touch Quick Edit. Both are Java applications and therefore don't look a lot like Mac OS X programs. Editor is designed to allow you to create labels with text, images, barcodes and entries from a database. The interface is arcane, though, bordering on impenetrable. With a quick read of the manual and study of the menus and palettes it is possible to get going, but it's a frustrating process. You can, however, print from any application.

Brother claims the P-Touch 9500pc is capable of printing at 40mm a second, and depending on when you start counting, that may be true. But the time taken to process even the most simple label print job was longer than we expected. That said, the process is complicated, and the resultant labels looked good.

The cost per label calculation for the PT9500pc is difficult to compute and will depend on what you're printing. However, if we take the example of an 8cm name badge printed on to 24mm High Grade TZ tape, it works out at around £20 for an eight-metre tape, or about 20p per badge. That's not cheap - and when you add to that the cost of the printer, it's clear there are cheaper labelling solutions available. However, it's important to remember that part of what you're paying for is the robustness of the printed label, so the PT9500pc could prove well worth the cost.

The PT9500pc is a neat solution to the problem of printing labels for use in environments where there's a significant amount of dust, dirt, oil or anything else that will destroy most labels. It's not without its problems: print job processing is slower than we'd like and the application software is quite daunting, but if you need a robust labelling solution, it's worth checking out.