Brother PT9500PC P-touch Desktop Label Maker

by Brother

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 13 x 7.8 x 9.5 inches ; 6.9 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 8 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B00011KHQ0
• Item model number: PT9500PC
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #46,672 in Office Products (See Top 100 in Office Products)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 17, 2003

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

The Brother PT-9500PC P-touch Label Maker lets you create a strip of labels directly from a PC or Mac. Simply connect the PT-9500PC to your computer and use Brother's easy-swap tape cassettes to print laminated labels with standard or industrial strength adhesive in a variety of fonts and styles. With built-in base code templates and symbols, this label maker delivers performance and reliability perfect for home and office use. This labeler also features an auto-cutter and can print crack-and-peel labels for easy peeling. You can even print pre-designed labels with your company logo or other graphics imported from a PC database. Other features include the ability to print from industry standard bar code symbologies, and the ability to save and recall frequently used label designs.

Product Description

The Brother PT-9500PC P-touch Label Maker lets you create a strip of labels directly from a PC or Mac. Simply connect the PT-9500PC to your computer and use Brother's easy-swap tape cassettes to print laminated labels with standard or industrial strength adhesive in a variety of fonts and styles. With built-in base code templates and symbols, this label maker delivers performance and reliability perfect for home and office use. This labeler also features an auto-cutter and can print crack-and-peel labels for easy peeling. You can even print pre-designed labels with your company logo or other graphics imported from a PC database. Other features include the ability to print from industry standard bar code symbologies, and the ability to save and recall frequently used label designs.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great printer, but BEWARE OF SOFTWARE INSTALLATION!, May 14, 2008

By 

HLC Technical Services (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brother PT9500PC P-touch Desktop Label Maker (Office Product)

I've had numerous P-Touch models over the years, and I think the output they produce is superb. The software for the Mac, on the other hand, has lagged far behind its Windows counterpart. Older versions of the software, in particular, had problems with anything except TrueType fonts.

Now I see that Brother finally released version 5 of the software for OS X. I downloaded it and was pleasantly surprised to see that it had an entirely different, more Mac-like interface, and it handled all of my fonts just fine. I was quite pleased until I tried to use some of my OTHER programs.

It seems that if you uninstall the older version of the software before installing this one--something Brother tells you to do in the instructions--IT WILL WIPE OUT FILES USED BY OTHER PROGRAMS! So far the uninstaller has trashed Office 2008, Acrobat Pro, Adobe Reader, iWork '08, Adobe Creative Suite CS3 and OmniOutliner. It's hard to tell what others might be affected as well. I ended up having to do a clean reinstall of my system, which was NOT a small task.

So, buy the printer if you like, but BEWARE the uninstaller!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well engineered product with a reasonable price tag, March 26, 2008

By 

Benjamin (CA, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Brother PT9500PC P-touch Desktop Label Maker (Office Product)

This label printer produces professional quality labels with ease. I was printing great looking lables for electronic equipment within 30 min of receiving the box. I use the the black on silver, 0.75" double strength tape and the black on white, 0.25", double-strength tape.
I did buy a Zebra 300 series before for twice the price of the PT9500PC but it took weeks until I was able to print labels due to mis-alignment issues and ribbon peeling off or not sticking to the labels.
Great product, highly recommended.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Label Printer, Good Software for Mac, March 17, 2009

By 

Quazar (San Francisco Bay Area) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Brother PT9500PC P-touch Desktop Label Maker (Office Product)

I received my Brother PT-9500PC Label Printer just over a week ago. Setup was very easy on my Macintosh. Rather than using the software on the provided disk, I downloaded the latest software and drivers from the Brother website and was up and running in minutes. I did have problems getting it to work when attached to a USB hub, but that could have been a problem with the hub rather than the printer. Once I plugged it directly into the computer, all was well. [edit: That hub has since been found to be defective]

Full version info, for those interested:
* Mac OS X 10.5.6 (Build 9G55)
* P-touch Editor 5.0 (Version 5.0.017)
* PT-9500PC Driver (Version 2.0.1)

The print quality of the labels is excellent. This is a 360 DPI printer, so it has a resolution similar to the early laser printers. Curves and edges appear rounded and smooth. You can see the pixels if you look really close, but print quality looks fine for most purposes. This means that you can use interesting fonts, including fonts with fairly thin lines if you want. Print speed is very good, and the printer can cut the tape completely between each label, or just score the label and leave the backing paper connected - this makes it easy to peel off the next sticker when printing a string of labels.

The software is much better than I was expecting - labeling software is often fairly lame. P-touch Editor 5.0 is a well put-together and professional looking software package. I haven't yet used all the features, such as auto-increment and bar-codes, but just from experimentation, those features appear to be easy to get to and use. One random note, though: I haven't found a way to rotate text to arbitrary angles (I was trying to place text diagonally). I assume I could do this in another software package and just import it as a picture, but I haven't tried.

The only reason I gave the product 4 stars instead of 5: The maximum print width is 27.1mm (just over 1"). This means that on the 1.5" labels, you get about 0.2" margins at the edges of the tape whether you want them or not. With smaller tape sizes, you can print to within 0.04" of the edge. This may or may not be an issue for you, but it is a fact that is buried in the tech specs. While it is true that it can print on all the listed tape sizes up to 1.5", it can't print near the edges of the 1.5" tape like it can on the narrower tapes.

All in all, I'm very happy with this product and I expect it to provide a long useful life just like my hand-held Brother P-touch labeler.