DYMO Label Writer 450 Twin Turbo Printer

We use this little printer, the Dymo LabelWriter 450 Turbo, to print ingredient and name labels for various products, all of which are used in a freezer and go through freeze/thaw cycles. The print quality is great and the off-brand labels I used (Enko) work great on our containers in the freezer.

We’ve printed over 42,000 labels in just six months and it has work perfectly the vast majority of the time. Every so often it jams and it can be a bit of a pain to get fixed, but it only takes a few minutes to get it working again. Also, if you put the labels in the wrong direction then it will 100% jam every time because there isn’t a sensor to tell it that they are in incorrectly, so just pay attention as you are installing it. They go in with the sticker facing down, so it is a bit odd initially.

We use three different sizes of labels and it takes literally SECONDS to change the label type. It also has a system in place which automatically prevents the labels from printing in the wrong spot. What that means is you will never have to slowly adjust the location of the labels on the spool to get it to print in the correct spot. It prints perfectly center every time.

The print quality is great – we can print extremely small font and it is still legible. It is very quick. The small labels we use can print about 2 per second and the largest can take about 1.5 seconds per label due to it having an image (our logo), but prints faster if only text is displayed.

The program that comes with it is adequate for printing simple labels and text. It is fairly simple to use and only has a couple of annoying aspects that can be overcome with some patience. For example, if you are typing or copy/pasting in a text box you will have to manually press enter for each line break, otherwise it will continuously write the text on the same line way off the screen.

Overall it is a great product. I will probably buy a couple more in case this one breaks, but at the sub $100 price point it is totally worth it, especially considering the volume of labels that have gone through it. Definitely recommended.

Easy to install, works great, no ink needed, accompanying software makes customising labels easy.
I bought both the “cheap” chinese labels and the more expensive ones made by Dymo. They both work well and look similar but the cheap ones do not stick as well as the Dymo ones. I labeled a shelf full of tool boxes using both types and noticed the Dymo ones stick way better, the cheap ones are lifting up at the corners. If your just sticking them on paper they both would probably work the same.

Great label printer. Never used one before but it was easy enough for me to navigate. The thermal printing is way better than anything else I’ve seen. It does not smudge! Small enough to store anywhere. Don’t recommend dropping it though since the plastic may crack or break. Overall very happy with it. Definitely recommend if you print labels often, or doesn’t require any ink or toner so you won’t have to worry about replacing any colors and it won’t expire either.

I was impressed from when I received it shortly after my purchase on May 6, 2014 and then sitting there between uses it failed to run the next time I needed it a year to the day after the purchase. What timing! It wouldn’t print, and it wouldn’t advance labels even at the buttons on the machine which will still glowing (staring at me with a “so there”). My PC incidentally (maybe related) also reported an unknown USB device. The last time I had used it, it had worked fine, so no calamity, no jam, no smoke or noise, it just quit. These have a TWO YEAR WARRANTY!

I called Dymo service 877-724-8324 and was quickly helped by technical support. All I needed to do was remove both labels, then remove the power and leave it removed until the lamps out front quit glowing (maybe 20-30 seconds). I then reinserted the power and those lights came on and flashed. I was instructed to reinsert the labels first left, then right, and as I did the motors grabbed the labels and finished feeding them until the electric end of label eye detected what it needed. At that point I could now manually feed labels. So I launched the software and printed a label, it worked fine. Technical support actually had one other trick (I didn’t find out what it was because I didn’t need it). Effectively what I had been walked through was a reset (reboot) of the instructions on the firmware of the Dymo Twin; I’ll be able to help myself if this happened again.

I don’t know for certain, but I think Dymo’s next trick would have been a delete-reinstall of the drivers in my PC to refresh that USB device and I had actually done that as a self-help attempt before calling them. If your machine just takes a coffee break like mine did, just do the sequence in the paragraph above; that may be all you need. If that doesn’t do it for you then call Dymo before messing around they may save you some time.

If that hadn’t worked for me they would have given me a way to get the printer back to them and they would have repaired it or sent a replacement. Great service, and I don’t mind the reboot, so far it’s only needed one reboot in a year so Dymo is way ahead of Microsoft.

As expected. Great service