Buy Now...

Mind you the colours of the P-touch 55 are more likely to appeal to the younger members out there with a tasteful pink or the lime green I was sent. There are other items in the range but this unit at less than £20 could well be an impulse buy.

The unit is a bit like a key shape being 15cm long and a maximum 8cm wide at the head. If you can type an SMS message then using the keyboard will be second nature, if you find a mobile phones keys to small then do not despair as these are somewhat larger. There are a total of 18 keys with a 3x1cm one line LCD display above to show what you have typed.

Apart from the A-Z and 0-9 there are no less than 66 signs and symbols most of which are accessed from the symbol key. Text can be printed in five different sizes and there are nine different text styles including vertical text. Text can be normal or underlined as well as printed within seven different box styles.

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Add to that – I hope you are still following – two label widths 9mm and 12mm with 12 possible combinations of cassettes with two cassette lengths 4metres and 8metres. The four metre tapes have a recommended price of £5.86 and £6.69 while the eight metre ones are £9.86 and £10.92. Rather like ink jet cartridges the manufacturers make their money from the replacement label cartridges. I only saw white with black lettering but there is also white with red or blue and also blue and yellow with black.

By default the unit will print capitals but another of the keys changes items typed to lower case, as with SMS messages pressing a character may not give the letter you want first press but no more than four presses – normally only up to three – will get the one you want. While I cannot type nearly as quickly as the young can product their text messages I have no doubt that labels can be produced in a matter of seconds.

A little practice and reading of the double sided A4 instruction sheet a couple of times should have you producing exactly what you want in a few minutes. The beauty of the system, nothing is printed, until you press the print button and however long or complex the label you have produced it can be edited and changed right up till then. Anything typed is stored in memory and remains there even once the unit is switched off. It is powered by 4AA batteries (not supplied) but they showed no signs of running out during my tests. However I can see no method of the unit turning itself off after say 5 minutes of inactivity apart from the on/off switch so perhaps this is an improvement that could be made or there could be lots of wasted batteries by less than careful users.

Great for the younger members but I suspect the more mature may well prefer one of the other – more expensive – models if only to have more sober colours. The drawback of this apart from the added cost is that they are larger. The stated price is less than £20. It should be available from Staples, Maplins Lakeland and others.

Link http://www.brother.co.uk/our_products/html/pto_55.html