The DYMO LabelManager 500TS ($199.99 direct) is more than just another label printer for the kind of plastic and fabric labels you can use indoor or outdoors. To begin with, it's one of a relatively few printers, along with the Editors' Choice Brother P-touch PT-2730 ($100 street, 4 stars), that can print labels either from a computer or as a self-contained system. What makes it stand out though—and makes it Editors' Choice—is how easy it is to use, thanks to a relatively large QWERTY keyboard, a bright, highly readable color touch screen, and a well-designed menu system. It's also unusual for the category in offering a 300 dot per inch print resolution.

Much like the PT-2730 , and unlike the handheld DYMO LabelManager 420P ($110 street, 4 stars), the 500TS  is a desktop unit, about the same width as a typical muti-line business phone, but a little shorter, at 6.5 inches wide by 7.5 inches deep. The bottom includes a little stand near the back, so the top of the printer angles up, putting it only about 1.5 inches off the desktop in the front, and 3.8 inches at the back. The angle makes the keyboard and touch screen easier to use, and reduces the likelihood of glare on the screen from overhead lighting.

Setting up

The printer is reasonably portable, at 1.7 pounds, and it includes a rechargeable battery, so you can take it with you to, say, a filing cabinet to print some labels without having to plug it in. If you leave it plugged in on your desk—which is what most people are likely to do most of the time—the screen turns into a digital desk clock, with big, highly readable numbers.

Setup take less than a minute. Simply install the supplied rechargeable battery, snap in a tape cartridge—one comes with the printer—and plug the power cord in. That's all it takes to be ready to create and print labels on the printer itself. If you want to print from your computer instead, or also, you can download the latest version of DYMO's label printing software from its Web site, install it, and connect with the supplied USB cable. I tested the printer with a system running Windows Vista. It also works with Windows 7 and XP, and with Mac OS X 10.4 and above.

Creating and Printing Labels

Creating labels and printing them is easy. Both DYMO's label program on the computer and the commands on the printer itself are straightforward enough so you should be able to print simple text labels immediately. Simply type in the text and hit the print button.

Spend a few minutes exploring the program or touch-screen menu system, and you'll quickly find more sophisticated options. You can, for example, change the font and font size, adjust the layout, and insert clip art, bar codes, fields that automatically increment numbers or add the date or time, and more.

The printer's touch-screen menus are extremely well designed. The touch screen itself is about 4.3 inches diagonally, brightly lit, and easy to read. The menu system is a model of self-explanatory design, making some so-called intuitive phone OSs, like Android, look like a collection of brain-twister puzzles in comparison.

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The only issue I had with the menu was a problem trying to scroll through the long list of clip art. The length of the list combined with a short scroll bar makes it hard to control the scrolling well enough to avoid skipping over multiple rows of choices. Even with this issue, the touch screen control counts as a significant strength.

Also helping to make the printer easy to use is a keyboard that uses a QWERTY rather than ABCD layout. Even better, it's big enough to use for two-finger typing without hitting the wrong keys constantly. And that's a true statement even if your hands, like mine, are big enough to palm a basketball.

Note that, unlike the PT-2730, the 500TS doesn't come with a library of commonly used labels in memory. However, DYMO says it has enough memory to store more than 500 labels—far more than the P-2730's maximum of 99 user-defined labels. You can save label formats after you create them on the printer, or can create them on your computer and then download them. You can also organize them into a hierarchical structure of folders and subfolders, to help make them easier to find.

Speed and Other issues

Print speed for this kind of label printer depends on the length of the label. With the 500TS, which has an automatic cutter, there's also the added time for cutting the label off of the roll, which remains the same no matter how long the label is. In my tests, a 3.5-inch label with the text, PCMag: Printer Speed Test took 6.5 seconds for both printing and cutting. A much longer label, slightly over six inches long, took 10 seconds.

That makes the 500TS faster than the PT-2730, which took 11.8 seconds to print and cut a 3.5-inch label. Both the DYMO 420P  and the Editors' Choice DYMO LabelManager PnP ($60 street, 4 stars) tied the 500TS at 6.5 seconds, but that's for printing only. Neither printer includes an automatic cutter, so you have to add the time it takes to manually cut the label.

DYMO offers a choice of 38 tape cartridges for the 500TS, in sizes ranging from 0.25 inch to 1 inch and an assortment of color combinations and types of tape, including standard laminated tape; flexible nylon tape for cables and other curved surfaces; and a polyester tape with an extra strength adhesive designed for permanent mounting on textured surfaces. The lengths vary with the type of tape, at 23 feet for the standard tape, 11.5 feet for the nylon tape, and 18 feet for the polyester tape.

When I reviewed the PT-2730, I said it was one of the most capable label printers we'd ever tested, if not the most capable. That's still true for printers in its price range, but if you can afford to spend more, the DYMO LabelManager 500TS is the more impressive printer. Not only does it offer a long list of features, from printing bar codes to storing more than 500 labels in memory, but it's particularly easy to use, thanks to the touch screen and large Qwerty keyboard. That makes it an easy pick for Editors' Choice for anyone who doesn't mind paying more to get more.

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