Brother P-Touch Cube Plus PT-P710BT Label Maker

Wonderful label maker. Easy and fun to use. Lots of options. This is one of my favorite things to use when working with my clients.

I bought this printer for basic product labeling: things like serial numbers for products I make. I chose it because it’s wireless and untethered (if you choose to use it that way), and the Bluetooth interface lets me programmatically generate, print, and even autocut labels. When I start doing small runs of products, each needing a unique label (due to changing serial numbers and MAC addresses), this is going to rock. The built-in rechargeable battery won’t chew through alkaline batteries or require swapping out NiMH rechargeable cells (and it prints while charging, too).

Brother has some other printers which don’t require AA/AAA batteries, but this one comes with a battery, whereas the others that offer a rechargeable battery require that it be bought separately, and they’re overpriced. The real deal-breaker over the other Brother plug-powered printers was that the other options use 12 V DC jacks, apparently wired for center-negative, outer-positive connections. This is really bad, because it means that replacement third-party power supplies have to be this special kind, and if you accidentally plug a Brother power supply into something else that uses 12 V, but wired for the almost universally-adopted center-positive standard, you could blow that device up. I’ve let that happen once and now I won’t allow center-negative power supplies into my household. Micro USB bypasses all that; it’s very much standardized.

I spent a day hacking on someone else’s open-source proof-of-concept Brother driver in Python. After sufficient tinkering, I can now print arbitrary monochrome PNGs (as long as they are the right height) on my Linux laptop via Bluetooth. It looks like it also supports USB communication, if you need to use it on a machine that doesn’t have Bluetooth. I haven’t tried the CUPS driver (but one exists) or the Windows utility.

Brother publishes an excellent and detailed programmer’s manual that gives you nearly everything you need to know to do your own custom low-level printing, so I think this can be great for production or manufacturing environments on a budget.

The convenience of being able to do one-off labels from my computer or my smartphone is a also huge win (you know, the intended application, lol). I had a project where I needed to print labels for hard disk serial numbers, so I used a barcode scanner app to read the serial number bar codes from the hard disk labels and then copied/pasted them into the Brother print app. This sounds clunky, but it’s way more convenient and error-proof than hand-keying all these numbers with a keyboard (whether on my phone or a label maker with a keyboard).

In fact, lack of a keyboard on the label maker isn’t really a concern here. You’re probably a lot better entering text on a cell phone than you are on a clunky label maker keyboard anyway, and you get perks like autocomplete, copy/paste, drag-and-drop WYSIWYG font adjustment and positioning, etc.

More great features: it has an automatic cutter, which is great for printing a batch of labels at once. And it’s possible to chain print labels to avoid the wastage you normally get at the beginning of a standalone label. You still do have to waste about an inch of tape for each batch job that you do, but that’s not really a big deal.

The Brother app on Android is okay and somewhat easy to use once you get the printer to pair with your phone and get the app to recognize it. It’s got some quirks and annoyances, but no show-stoppers. For example, fine position adjustment of objects like text or images is tricky, because if you only move your finger a little bit, it’ll think you’re long-pressing the object and offer to delete the object or whatever. You have to move objects faster (and therefore further away than you want) so that it recognizes that this is a move command, and then you have to move it back to be closer to where you want. And it doesn’t show the object as it’s being moved, it only shows the bounding box, so it can be tricky to get objects to go exactly where you have them in mind.

I decided to review it after I dropped it onto some concrete stairs I tripped on (I broke most of its fall–d’oh!), and it’s still working.

Weaknesses of this printer:

* While this is a Bluetooth printer, it has no security, and no way to disable Bluetooth that I’ve seen. It’s an open Bluetooth printer for anybody within range to pair with and print to. This will probably never be a real-world problem for me, but in theory some neighbor’s kid could eat through all my tape with dumb/offensive messages if I left this turned on.

* It automatically powers off a little zealously when left inactive while running on battery power. If plugged into a USB port, I think it still auto-powers-off, but much less quickly. Bluetooth should be pretty light on current draw if done correctly, so it’d be nice if they didn’t turn it off so quickly.

* It doesn’t support 1.5″ TZe tape, only up to 1″. That’s still pretty good, but I didn’t realize I was limiting my options when I bought it.

* The TZe tape cartridge system and/or Brother’s standard print heads require a lot of top/bottom margin; the print area is smaller than I’d like. For example, for the 1″ nominal/24 mm actual tape, the print area is 128 dots vertically, or 18.06 mm high. That means you have a required margin of at least 3 mm on the top and bottom. This margin gets smaller with smaller tape widths, down to almost nothing on the 3.5 mm tape. Look up the Brother programmer’s manual for this printer to find the exact limitations if this matters to you.

* The print resolution isn’t super great, but it does have a reasonable high-resolution mode. This prints at 360×180 dpi instead of the usual 180×180 DPI, presumably by running the tape a little bit slower through the print head. This does improve text and graphics legibility, in a similar way to how subpixel antialiasing improves text legibility on a computer LCD screen: the horizontal resolution matters more, so it’s good that it can boost that dimension of resolution.

Utilisé particulièrement pour étiqueter mes aliments congelés sous vide mais étalement pour identifier mes documents.

Upgraded from a keyboard version of this and have no regrets! Connects by bluetooth and the iOS app is great! easy to do and you can use one of your photos but I would recommend atleast 18mm width eztape so you can see the details a bit better if it was a photo. Otherwise simple photo patterns look great even at 12mm. It has a rechargeable system so doesn’t take like 8 AA batteries like the old versions.

The cons, I do notice it does cut off / wastes about an inch of tape for each tag you create. No matter what the settings are. But then again it was like this for all the old systems as well.

Really like this 4.5/5 stars!

Installing on my phone was easy, but installing on Windows10 took some time – not really hard but took a few frustrating tries. Brother, are you reading this? The Printer driver was the tricky step – took a few reboots , de-installing and then rebooting, then reinstalling, rebooting again, and the third time it suddenly worked.

The printer itself is really good. A huge step up from every other label maker as you can make nice designs, choose fonts, etc. and make really satisfying labels.

Brother iOS App provides many templates and the ability to easily create your own customs labels.