We just got the latest and greatest label printer from Dymo, and by golly, it IS the latest and greatest.
Dymo has been making these small desktop label printers for a couple of decades or so, and they’ve always been expensive: around $200 (all prices U.S). That’s expensive compared with printing labels from your regular printer. The tiny label printers sure are convenient, though; they can print your company logo along with a return address.
While earlier Dymo versions were content to print labels you could stick on envelopes and packages, this one, the LabelWriter Duo, also prints stamps. These are real stamps, authorized by CanadaPost through a service called Endicia. You can sign up either at the Endicia Web site (www.Endicia.com), or the Dymo site (www.dymo.com).
If you buy the Dymo LabelWriter Duo printer, you pay for only the stamps, otherwise there’s a minimum fee of $10 a month.
The Duo (“duo” because it prints both stamps and labels) has some interesting features. For one, it’s a thermal printer, so it never needs ink. Thermal printers have been around a long time, and they work fine, using a heated print-head to register letters on specially treated paper. That means you don’t have to buy ink, but you do have to buy thermal paper rolls.
Some of these thermal paper rolls allow you to print white lettering on black labels, and others produce blue or red type on white labels. Typical prices run around $20 for a roll of 700 white address labels, more or less for other quantities and special colours.
Well, color us sort of enchanted with this thing. We may never go to the post office again. We can also print to-do notes and important phone numbers and stick them on the computer monitor frame. (Isn’t that what everybody does?) The Dymo can be used with either PCs or Macs. The LableWriter Duo lists for $210.
If you don’t care about printing your own stamps, Seiko makes a small label printer that we found at newegg.com for $81.
Wireless presenter
The Presto WMS 100 Image lets the user control a digital projector from anywhere in a fairly large room: good for presentations.
The device attaches to the projector, so it can receive wireless signals from a laptop or any other PC that is wireless-enabled. You can surf the Web and project the results onto a large screen.
Others with wireless laptops can also use the device to project images from their own computers onto the large viewing screen, one sender at a time. The list price is $280 from www.newsoftinc.com.
Internuts
Check out www.kbears.com. It is another new educational site for children. It can’t match the recent AOL site KOLjunior.com for sheer bravura and content, but it has good stuff and is worth visiting. It has pictures and coloring books of more dinosaurs than we ever heard of, plus odd facts about everything, nice games and sample music from many countries. All free.
Travel adapter
Travel season is coming up, and one of the regular worries many travelers have is voltage variations as you move between countries. We just got a travel adapter from Targus (www.targus.com) for $20. It has nested plugs in a compact set that covers electrical outlets in 120 countries. Should be enough.
Digital photo frame
We couldn’t think of a market for this, but maybe you can.
We received a Digital Picture Frame for review from Edge Technology. Plug a camera memory card into one or both of two slots and you can view the photos on a 3 1/2-by-6-inch screen. The photos display either singly or as a slide show. If you first put the camera card into your computer and drag MP3 files onto it, you’ll get music with your slideshow. You can also display video clips.
The display has numerous controls and does not need to be connected to a computer. Some of the controls provide editing features for contrast, brightness, etc., and you can operate them by remote control. The list price is $150 from www.edgetechcorp.com. Everything worked all right; we just couldn’t figure out who would
