Good

The vretti Thermal Label Printer device is neither user friendly nor easy to use, at least not for me. I have multiple Dymo LabelWriters and setup has always been so simple with those. Unfortunately, I was expecting similar ease of use with the vretti and it fell short. The setup and install of the drivers was overly complicated and quite frankly burdensome. It took tech support from my companys IT department to get it up and running and even they struggled. The hassle alone in getting the install done was enough to make me want to give up on using it. The printer comes with a print sample which I assume demonstrates the quality of the print. No matter what settings I used, I could never achieve the same print quality. I tried multiple different labels, tweaked with the speed and darkness settings, but I was never able to get the same print quality. This was frustrating and the quality is subpar. At a fraction of the cost of competitor products, I really had high hopes here that fell short. Ultimately, I am choosing to fall back on my trusted Dymo for my label printing needs.

The printer is of a reasonable form factor for a desktop thermal printer. I inserted a roll of 4x6 direct thermal paper, installed the drivers and was able to do a test print easily. Printing directly to it using the system print dialog was easy enough as well. Print quality - even using the settings claimed on the provided sample - was not as good as the sample. Assuming the settings are accurate, either their label paper is significantly better, or they faked the samples on another printer. The sample is darker, has no directional smudging, and is generally clearer. Using the same settings (speed of 4, darkness of 8) generates lighter print, directional smear, and fuzzy edges. At 1/3rd the cost of a comparable Zebra printer, I definitely get the appeal. If you plan to use this in a commercial environment, I recommend spending extra for the Zebra. If you are doing small quantity or low-priority stuff at home, this might be a decent fit. Where I ran into issues was using the Zebra SDK to send print jobs directly to the printer. Ive used it with a variety of other printers via TCP and USB, however this printer by default uses a virtual printer connection and does not seem to be compatible either with the Zebra SDK or with a direct USB logic. I reached out to the manufacturers regarding this but never got a reply. Eventually I resolved it by running through the winspool.drv using C#. I know Im an outlier in designing a program to print to it, but the reason I bring this up is that it may not be compatible with some programs that need to print to it. If you print with the system dialog youll probably be fine, though.

Once it gets going this Vretti label prints fast. That is by far its best feature. But first things first. The printer is 6 3/4 inches wide, 6 1/4 inches tall and 8 1/4 inches deep. It is definitely larger than I thought it would be, but that is for good reason as most of the volume allows a sizable roll of labels to be installed inside. It weighs in at a hefty 3 pounds without a roll of labels inside. Along with the printer, the box contains: ! External power brick. External power supplies are annoying. I would have preferred a label printer that is powered via USB and barring that one that has a built-in power supply to avoid having to deal with a sizable brick. ! 4 foot USB-A to USB-B cable. The printer is somewhat old school in that it has a USB-B port. A modern device should be USB-C based, IMO. I did not use this cable as I have a USB-C to USB-B cable on hand to use with my Mac. ! Instruction manual. The most important information in the manual related to function of the single button on top of the printer. ! Sample printed labels. The sample is useful for getting a quick understanding of the quality of the output, which IMO is quite high. I don’t know what the official DPI is but they look good and read well, that’s good enough for me. My complaint with the sample labels is that there are no additional unprinted sample labels included in the box. Unless you have labels on hand, you cannot put this printer to use right out of the box, even to test it. ! 1GB USB thumb drive. This drive contains the manual in PDF form, some guidance videos and printer drivers for Mac, Windows and Linux. That makes up only about 500MB of data on the 1GB drive! I appreciate that I can reformat and use this drive for other data now. Nice bonus. I do not have a roll of 4x6 labels on hand but I do have fanfold stock. Luckily this printer has a slot at the bock that allows external labels to be fed into it. With labels inserted as guided, holding down the feed button on the top of the printer initiate the calibration process that will result in the ejection of one or two unprinted, wasted labels. This is one area of complaint that I have. If you move the printer around with an external stack of labels, you will have to calibrate the printer each time, losing a label or two each time. If the printer is stationary or there is a roll of labels inside, recalibration is not necessary. IMO this printer works best with label rolls for this reason. I have a roll on order and will update this review if the experience is not as expected. The label guides allow labels up to a maximum width of 4.25 inches. Installing the driver for this printer is very straightforward using macOS Printers & Scanners settings page. On my Mac, with the driver installed the printer shows up as BARCODE 4B-2054L I do not have any professional shipping software installed on my Mac nor do I use a cloud host shipping applications. My process to print a label is not the most efficient but as I don’t print tons of labels that is fine. When I use a site like FedEx.com or UPS.com to generate a label, the label will inevitably be positioned for 8.5x11 paper and not in a 4x6 format. I preserve the label into PDF form and then screen capture the label into the macOS Preview app and print from there. Perhaps this printer integrates well into a shipping application workflow but I’m not able to test that. My use for the Vretti is 4x6 labels only. I am aware that this printer will work with labels of other sizes and widths. Once the printer gets printing, the label is spit out in a split second. I did not realize that a thermal printer of this nature can print so quickly so I am pleasantly surprised. Maybe that’s why it needs the external power source. One problem: I cannot get two labels to print in a row without the second label printing into the gap. The printer driver has a GapsHeight setting from 0 to 0.394 inches and while the actual labels have a 0.25 inch gap between them, setting GapsHeight even to 0.394 inches does not fix this issue. Perhaps if there was a larger setting like 0.5 inches I could get this to work right. Overall this is a decent label printer. My complaints are minor to not so minor, like the need for a power brick and wasting labels on calibration and inability to print two in a row without messing up the second one. I use this printer only occasionally and cannot verify if it can be a workhorse in a situation when shipping labels are constantly needed through the day. UPDATE: After printing just a few labels, I was temporarily not able to get it to work again. After turning it on, the LED blinks blue briefly, then blinks purple followed by rapid red and cycles with intermittent beeps thrown in. No matter what I did I could get the printer to reset. I left it off in frustration for a few minutes, turned it back on again and it went into ready state and I could print again. This is not confidence inspiring behavior. Docking another star for this.

I have a tech guy at home so I can say it was easy for me to set up. Works as expected and makes shipping items easier.

A big improvement over handwriting or single feeding a huge label thru a regular printer. The printer works well, prints clearly and works for all the shippers I use. I like that it is a thermal printer, so there will never be ink to worry about!

Im not taking stars away for my own mistake but this has not worked for what I was hoping to use it for. Otherwise this is a perfectly good shipping label printer as far as I can tell.

Well unfortunately my laptop is a Chromebook so it was not compatible to use this shipping label printer

We have an in-home Etsy shop that we run on-the-side, so wed always thought about getting a printer to print labels exclusively, so this was an ideal situation, and it works really well. It does jam from time to time, but that could also be the types of labels weve been using. Were not using brand name labels at all - all off-brand, full disclosure - but this has been mostly very good to us. Im not one to complain, especially when Im just giving honest feedback. I also try not to move it around much from where it sits, because I dont want to aggravate it - I feel like once I have it working well, why mess with a good thing? :)

Horrible printer, prints fades, super complicated to install.