- VERDICT
The Brother VC-500W is an impressive and versatile solution for anyone who wants to put their touch on their home, office and small business.
Brother is already well-known for its label makers but it has taken that to the next level with the brand new VC-500W – a full-colour direct label printer that makes it easy to customise your labels and enhance your home projects.
The VC-500W can produce full colour glossy labels from 9mm up to 50mm wide using ZINK Zero-Ink printing which uses heat to activate colour crystals in the paper and create full-colour labels with no ink in sight.
Not only can it be used for labels you can also print out images as well.
In fact, there are numerous uses for the Brother VC-500W.
The obvious use is as a label maker whether you want to organise your office or your pantry.
But there are numerous other uses in the home which can be achieved with a sticker that can be up to 50mm wide and up to 5m long.
Whether you want to print a colourful glossy name tag for your child’s bedroom door or a photo ID for an office visitor, the Brother VC-500W can handle it all.
You might want to make fancy name tags for your next dinner party or create cute decorations and gift labels for your child’s birthday party.
Small businesses are also taking advantage of the Brother VC-500W’s capabilities printing their own labels and decorating product packaging.
This means you can produce what looks like professionally-printed labels for your boxes that look like they came out of the factory instead of a small desktop printer.
You can even use it to print out address labels to stick directly to envelopes and packages
The unit itself is quite small with a tiny footprint that wouldn’t take up any more room than a smart speaker.
The device is powered by a companion app – Color Label Editor – which gives users access to hundreds of built-in templates, icons, frames, filters fonts and backgrounds as well as images from your mobile device.
Users can also connect and print from the P-Touch Editor application that runs on Mac and PC computers.
For our review we chose the Android version of the app.
You can easily print photos from your camera roll or directly from Instagram.
The app runs in landscape mode – so you need to turn your phone sideways.
The Color Label Editor app needs a bit of work in the design department. It’s a little bit clunky.
The process of connecting the Brother VC-500W was a little difficult and it constantly sent us through the same set up menus.
It took a while to link to the printer through wi-fi and when it showed up in our list of networks it took a few attempts to connect to it.
When we finally did we then had to link the printer to our network and enter the password.
That was done quickly and easily but the app was still not recognising the connection and the printer .
We were in this frustrating set-up loop and going down the same path to link via wi-fi.
When we eventually got it working it was easy to design and print our labels.
But we discovered the settings within the app defaulted to manually cut the label so we had to use scissors.
We did notice later that there was an auto cut option which made things a lot easier.
The app also remembers all of your most recent designs so can easily go back in and reprint or update and edit a new version.
And of course, you can simply peel off the backing and stick the label wherever you want.
Creative users can come up with some incredible results.
There are plenty of suggestions and alternatives within the app to let your creativity run wild.
Colour quality and accuracy is impressive when you consider it is actually not using any ink.
Users can choose five different role widths – 9mm, 12mm, 19mm, 25mm and 50mm.
Each role comes in its own cassette which is easily inserted into the back of the machine.
And it’s easy to interchange the cassettes when you want a different width on your label.
The Brother VC-500W is available now and is priced at $329 from Officeworks and Label City.
VERDICT
The Brother VC-500W is an impressive and versatile solution for anyone who want to put their touch on their home, office and small business.
