Pros & Cons
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- Fast
- Good print quality
- Runs on USB or rechargeable battery
- Automatic cutter
- Large selection of label types in several colors and sizes
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- Expensive consumables
Brother P-touch Cube Plus Specs
| Color or Monochrome | Monochrome |
| Connection Type | Bluetooth |
| Connection Type | USB |
| Cost Per Page (Color) | N/A |
| Cost Per Page (Monochrome) | N/A |
| Maximum Scan Area | N/A |
| Maximum Standard Paper Size | 1" roll |
| Monthly Duty Cycle (Maximum) | Not rated |
| Monthly Duty Cycle (Recommended) | Not rated |
| Number of Ink Colors | 1 |
| Printer Input Capacity | Roll feed |
| Rated Speed at Default Settings (Color) | N/A |
| Rated Speed at Default Settings (Mono) | 20mm per second |
| Scanner Optical Resolution | N/A |
| Scanner Type | N/A |
| Standalone Copier and Fax | N/A |
| Type | Printer Only |
The Brother P-touch Cube Plus ($99.99) is an upgrade from the Editors' Choice Brother P-touch Cube. And what a difference that "Plus" makes. Yes, the new label printer costs $40 more than its predecessor, but it's twice as fast, prints a more diverse array of label sizes, and has a more robust feature set. The P-touch Cube Plus easily supplants its older sibling as our Editors' Choice consumer label printer.
Borderline Professional
Label printers span the gamut from inexpensive personal and home-oriented machines that manage a few labels per minute to honking multi-thousand-dollar beasts that churn out hundreds of labels in seconds. The Cube Plus is clearly lower-end and just barely qualifies as "professional," though it is robust enough for easily and conveniently labeling the file folders, supply cabinets, and other items in your small or home-based office.
Aside from coming in different colors (the Plus is black, and the non-Plus version comes in either white or blue), these two printers look very similar. Measuring 5 by 2.6 by 5 inches (HWD) and weighing 1.4 pounds, the Cube Plus is a bit larger than the Cube, but close in size to a few other competing labelers in this class, including the Dymo MobileLabeler. Compared with truly professional-grade label printers like Brother's own QL-820NWB, though, the P-touch Cube models and others in this group are indeed small.
Another advantage of the Cube Plus over the Cube is that it comes with a built-in battery that's rechargeable via USB, while its sibling runs on wall power or six AAA batteries. In addition, the Cube Plus supports simultaneous connections, and you can design and print labels from your Windows or macOS laptop or desktop PC, whereas the older version only works with Android or iOS mobile devices.
There's no control panel, so all label design and printing is performed and initiated via a mobile app or computer software. On the back of the Plus you'll find a mini-USB port for connecting directly to your computing device and/or charging the battery, and a power button.
On the left face of the cube, there's a small window that allows you to see how much blank label tape remains, and a power status light is located on the top edge. The Cube Plus comes with an automatic cutter, which is handy for printing multiple copies of the same label or, say, groups of labels from a mailing list, without you having to stay with the printer to cut them one at a time.
On the right face is the hatch that holds the blank label cartridges, which in this case are audio-cassette-like tapes containing 16.4- or 26.2-foot spools of plastic tape in widths of 3.5mm, 5mm, 6mm, 9mm, 12mm, 18mm or 24mm widths. Brother offers more than 40 P-touch TZe-series label cartridges in several color schemes, such as black on white, black on clear, black on yellow, black on pastel purple, gold on satin silver, and so on.
Pair and Go
The software bundle for both Windows and Mac consists of P-touch Editor, a label design tool comprising fonts, drawing tools, custom borders and frames, numerous predefined label templates, bar codes, imported graphics, and the ability to import your own images and graphics, such as your company logo. You can also merge and print multiple labels for mass mailouts from Excel, Outlook, and other databases.
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For designing and printing labels from your smartphone or tablet, you can use P-touch Design&Print and/or Brother iPrint&Label. The latter, shown to the left, is the more robust of the two and lets you create labels from your contact lists, but both come with ample label design tools and templates.
Brother rates the Cube Plus at 20mm per second. More importantly, though, is how fast it prints specific types of labels. It printed my simple 0.47-by-3.5-inch text label in 3 seconds, or in about half the time as its older sibling, and it printed 10 of them in succession, cutting each one, in about 30 seconds, which is, again about half the time of its predecessor. But then, since the machine did the cutting during the Cube Plus tests, while I had to cut each label with the manual cutter on the older model, this is hardly an empirically controlled test.
As for print quality, the Cube Plus prints as well as most other thermal printers, having a maximum print resolution of 180dpi. I printed several different types of labels, some with fancy frames and fonts, some with graphics, and so on, and everything came out looking well above acceptable.
What your per-label cost will be depends on the type, length, and width of the labels you print, where you buy them, whether you buy multi-cartridge packages or single-cartridge packs, etc. Using Brother Mall pricing, printing 1-by-3-inch labels from a 26.2-foot roll will run you about 30 cents per label. If you're printing huge numbers of labels at a time, you're better off with a die-cut label maker like Brother's own QL-800, which can churn out address labels for as low as 2.5 cents.
An Easy Choice
Unless your labeling is very basic, the $40-list price difference between the P-Touch Cube and the P-Touch Cube Plus seems trivial. Spending the extra cash gets you a built-in rechargeable battery, an automatic cutter, twice the speed, and support for multiple users and more devices. Yes, the older Cube is a good product at a fair price, but if you need to do some serious labeling at home or around the office, our latest Editors' Choice for a consumer-grade labeler, the P-touch Cube Plus, is an excellent choice.