When it comes to high-quality label printing and ease of use, Dymo printers are big winners, and now three models—the LabelWriter 400 Turbo, LabelWriter Duo , and the one I tested, the LabelWriter Twin Turbo—come with the attractive benefit of free postage printing. I tried out a pay service that allows you to print postage with the Dymo LabelWriter 330 Turbo ( ) a while back, and I was intrigued to find out what the Dymo LabelWriter Twin Turbo with Dymo Stamps software had to offer Mac users.
The Twin Turbo printer lets you put two label rolls in the side-by-side spools, and it’s easy to switch label types. You use the Dymo Label software to print and design labels, and version 7.5.0.6 worked fairly well for me, except for some quirkiness I encountered when modifying text formatting and indicating in the main window’s drop-down menu which spool I wanted to print from (I had to do that by drilling down in the Print dialog box). The label-printing speed is impressive, at about one label per second, or 55 labels per minute, and the print quality stays high even when printing numerous labels. The quality of the printed labels is lower than that of a laser printer, but it’s good enough for printing shipping labels and other office labels.
The Dymo Stamps application, which lets you print stamps for a few common postage classes, is a stripped-down version of Endicia’s $16-per-month postage service. As you might imagine, the pay service offers many more features than this free service.
The only items in the printer that need to be replaced are new labels, at an average of $13 per roll for common label types, or about six cents per label. Replacement stamp labels cost about eight cents per stamp label, so the premium on postage is fairly high. But I’d take the convenience of this sturdy, nifty label printer any day.
A Dymo Stamps Dashboard widget is also available, which provides you with three stamp choices. The printer spit out stamps faster than it took me to even contemplate a trip to the post office, and I saved money by weighing my letters and printing only the postage I needed. Depending on your own habits, this may make up for the premium on the stamp labels.
Macworld’s buying advice
The Dymo LabelWriter Twin Turbo with Dymo Stamps software is the only postage-and-label-printer combination for the Mac, and it’s a high-quality one at that. If you need to print labels on demand as well as postage, it will pay for itself quickly. Another plus is that the printer uses a thermal printing process that doesn’t use ink or toner.
[ Jennifer Berger is a former Macworld editor, now an editor and writer in San Francisco, who has a very organized and clearly labeled set of file cabinets. ]
Dymo LabelWriter Twin Turbo Dymo Stamps software lets you print stamps in many denominations, depending on the weight of your letter or parcel.