vretti Bluetooth Thermal Shipping Label Printer, Wireless 4x6 Label Printer for Shipping Packages, Thermal Printer Compatible with Ebay, Amazon, USPS, Shopify, Android, iPhone and Windows
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Amanda Thibodeaux
> 3 dayWasnt what I wanted. Sent it back. Cant really give my honest review cuz I never even hooked it up or plugged it in. I gave 3 stars cuz that seemed like the fairest rating.
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Anson
> 3 dayOnce 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.