Dymo LabelWriter 400 Label Printer (69100)

I use my Dymo LabelWriter for the normal tasks such as making labels for mailing envelopes, file labels, etc.

My friends and family (and people in stores) laugh when they see me pull out my 'notes' which are all on labels.

My grocery list is on labels.

My LIFE seems to be printed on labels in one way or another. People could read my labels and get a good idea of who I am and what I do.

When my LabelWriter wears out, I'll be getting another Dymo LabelWriter to replace it. It just doesn't wear out though.

In this day & age, I'd recommend a dual label printer. Once you get one, you'll be addicted and you'll wish you had a doubleshot. Having the ability to print two label sizes without replacing the roll ever time is really a convenience.

That being said, this is a great model but it doesn't print postage. You need a Turbo for that feature.

I have owned about 5 Dymo printers over the last 10 years or so. Why so many? Because after about 2 years or so they ALL stopped working suddenly and inexplicably. Our company bought the 400 turbo about 20 months ago to replace another Dymo printer. After working for that time, it suddenly malfunctioned - like all the others before it. This really bothered me and caused me to wonder if there was a defect.

This time I called customer service and spoke to a very unfriendly sounding person who asked, when was the last time I cleaned the unit. Never, I responded, should I have? She explained that there is a cleaning card in the unit and you need to run it through the machine frequently - evidently the rollers collect dust and debris quickly and that clogs up the mechanism. Okay fine. I asked how often does it need to be cleaned, she told me every month or it will cause damage to the unit and that to fix it we would have to send it in and pay for the repair and damages caused by our neglect. Our neglect? I explained that there are no directions on when or how to clean the unit included in the box. This is when she got really hostile and said that it is assumed you will be doing the maintenance and upkeep or pay for the damage. When I questioned her about this policy and she promptly hung up on me. Great customer service Dymo...keep it up!

So I tried to clean the unit but the cleaner card would not feed through the rollers. I think the these Dymo label printers are just too cheap to last very long.

We just bought the Brother QL570. It looks a lot better made and so far it performs great. Hopefully it will last longer than the Dymo junk.

I have had an Ebay business for the last 9 years, and was getting tired of hand-printing the addresses ad literally cutting and pasting the addresses from the receipts I would print out. Enter the Dymo 400, which I snagged last Wednesday.

I opened the box and took out everything and started hooking it up to the computer. I'm a Mac user so I really expected a few problems to crop up with what I've read on here. I read the directions and installed the software first (very important) and then hooked up the printer. My Mac immediately recognized that I had installed it, and within minutes I was printing labels using their pre-formatted software. What a difference my Ebay packages look with these labels!

Overall so far I am a very very satisfied customer. You really can't go wrong here.

Tom

The Dymo 400 is a great label printer. We have 4 of them at work that see daily usage. The printers themselves are terrific. They just work. No jams, no failures, extremely few misprints. We do a lot of volume printing for shipping labels and name tags, and the Dymo 400s never have issues.

They print about one tag per second, which is fast enough for us. If yo you want greater speed, get the Dymo 400 Turbo. They don't print in color, but we don't need color for shipping labels and name tags.

I do not recommend you use the printing software that comes with them. It is pretty poor. Also, don't install the drivers that come on the CD. Download the newest ones directly from Dymo's webpage. That will save you a lot of hassles, as some of these seem to ship with outdated, problematic drivers. This is especially true if you're using the printer with Vista!

Overall, these get the job done with a minimum of fuss. They don't print in color, and the drivers are spotty, but they are fantastic at what they're intended for: printing labels.

For years I used a DYMO Label Maker 320 with no problem. Recently I upgraded to the model 400. I expected to plug it in, load the software from the enclosed CD, and start making lables. Boy, was I wrong. The 400 printed one lable and quit. No error message; no nothing. I went to the DYMO website, which told me to follow some directions to remove part of the installed software. I did what it said, but nothing improved. After several hours of aggrevation, I finally found what they call a "firmware update" that fixed the problem. In short, they put out a plug and play machine with software that doesn't work out of the box, and then did a poor job of telling the unsuspecting user how to upgrade it to fix their original mistake. Shame on you DYMO! I no longer recommend their lable maker.

Using this printer with my Mac has given me headaches, so Mac users listen up. This printer works well and is one of the more cost effective options out there. But, if you run into problems (like getting random error messages when trying to print) I have found the easiest solution is to unplug the power cord from the printer and plug it back in. It seems to re-set the printer and debug whatever problem was going on. It's annoying, but aren't all printers?

Very easy to install. Performs wonderfully. Better than expected. Can't imagine why we waited so long to purchase this item.

I've owned this printer for a couple of years. Overall it is a pretty good printer. The quirks that this printer has is that it sometimes fails to see the end of a label after printing and spits out a blank label. You have to manually cut the label with a pair of scissors and refeed the labels in the printer. If you manually reload the label feed for each label printed you don't have that problem, but you have to refeed each and every time you want to print. Doesn't matter what kind of labels I print, it happens almost each time. Refeeding can be somewhat of a pain but not too bad. Be careful - it does have a tendency to wrap around the feed roller and jam.

After reading numerous reviews on this product here, it seems to be a fine label printer for the home user. I would like to add some of the drawbacks for this product in corporate use.

My company uses these label writers in each of its boutique-sized stores. It gets used daily, sometimes hundreds of labels at a time.

I am dissatisfied that it does not operate in the background. The same computer that prints the label also is used to ring up clients. It seems the software is limited in this capacity because you cannot have the labels print in the background while ringing up clients. Not so great if you need to get some labels printed during business hours. It could cost you sales with impatient clients.

The last label in a roll regularly jams up. It wraps itself around the roller and gets stuck. The design of the printer doesn't allow for easy opening to fix this, and as a result, many printers have had to be replaced. If there were a way to open and clean it out, it would be a great improvement to its design! I find I waste a lot of labels by proactively changing the roll if I don't think there's enough labels to do the specific print job.

We purchased this LW 400 to replace a LW 330 that gave out on us after years of faithful service. The 400 is even faster and seems to be designed a little better. Otherwise works much the same as our older models. This is a solid mature product and I would recommend to anyone who needs it. Install and use is very easy and user friendly.

BTW, you can do some fairly advanced stuff with these printers if you desire. I've written some Office code that integrates the printer into an Access database so we can print labels directly from Access.

Only warning I have is that once one person gets a LW on their desk everyone else seems to want one too!

Robert
Network Admin

I purchased this printer primarily to print postage with my [...] account, having grown tired of trying to keep various sizes and types of labels at hand. Works very well, quick, quiet, and a very small footprint. Labels are easy to change if I wish to print something other than postage. Included software is more than adequate for that task and is easy and intuitive to use. Installation was a snap. My only gripe is the printer does not have an "off/on" switch. That would be nice as I like to turn off my various peripherals to cut down on energy consumption. So I unplug it. Not that hard to do. Overall a great device!

I utilize several of these in my office, and am slowly replacing older 300 series label printers as they fail. My only complaint is that occasionally one will stop communicating for no apparent reason, and there is no way to trouble shoot it. Typically a uninstall/reinstall of the hardware will fix the problem, but I have had a few USB ports go bad on me as well.

I purchased this printer for the ease of selling and labeling items on eBay. It's exactly what I was looking for - fast, inexpensive, and reliable. Once I found the right labels (PayPal might have listed the wrong label type in one of their help documents, you need label 99019 for PayPal, FYI), everything worked out GREAT, and I'm printing easily and quickly without any inks to worry about. It's perfect and I actually enjoy watching the label print out, sharp text too!

I got this based on the high marks but I'm not impressed with its' performance. I think that some of the reviews are off-base.
The application software is not that well designed; it is not intuitive to navigate (at least for me). Simple features you would expect from an application don't work like copy (using ctl + c) and paste (using ctl + v). I'm surprised that no label templates are provided for Microsoft word.
The hardware is also not well-designed. It fails to print for no obvious reason with no debug information. It also mangles labels that do print by pulling up label separators during the printing process.
Dymo technical support was not helpful; I used their website chat support and they were not able to help me make the printer work. I'd like to think that as an engineer, I'm fairly savvy about how things work, but I have not able to get the printer to perform well.
I would not recommend this label printer.

I love this product. It works wonderful. Uses no ink and takes only seconds to print out. Saves a bunch of time. Great product. Love it.

The price on these things is a bit out there for such a small printer, but once I broke down and bought it I can't believe I wasted so much time fighting with my stupid regular printer attempting to create labels...or printing them by hand.

This thing is awesome. By the time you reach from the computer to the printer, the label is already done. No hassle. (I just have the 400, not the turbo.)

Another nice feature is NO INK! No smudges or drying time. No outrageously priced cartridges. The labels come out looking professional , don't smudge - even if they get wet, and stick far better than the regular sheet labels. I always ended up taping over those so they wouldn't fall off in transit.

Love the thing.

I love my Dymo LabelWriter 400 Turbo ! It is fast, quiet, and extremely useful. It prints very high quality, crisp text. I print address labels and postage stamps. It is easy to reload labels and a pleasure to use on my Apple Mac Mini.

We returned a competing product. This label maker - although requiring additional downloads and info from Dymo (which we obtained prior to ordering) - works with Mac and the Mac contacts. Thankfully.

The printer works really, really well -- I've run 9000 labels through mine so far, and it's a total champ (it even senses when you run through the end of the roll and only print half a label, and reprints that one when you load the next roll and resume printing).

The software, at least on the Mac, is a little flaky... It's really difficult to get the formatting exactly right, and the Office plug ins don't seem to work at all.

Still, the excellent printer mechanism gets this four stars -- four-and-a-half, if I could!

We got tired of handwriting addresses, etc. for our small business, so we bought a Labelwriter 400. I didn't expect much--most inexpensive printers come with buggy, hard to use software and drivers, are slow, jam, etc. Not so with this product. We have been using it on both Mac and PC and it is startlingly easy to use and quick on both. Integrates perfectly with Quickbooks 2007 for PC. Addresses automatically print with the postal codes which is very cool. I almost never give any product five stars, but feel that this one deserves them because for us, it has exceeded our expectations in every way. I can't think of a single aspect of it that has disappointed us. We are now using it to label everything. A great little office tool that beats my lousy handwriting and makes everything look professional.

If you're trying to get organized and save time, you NEED this product. Note also that this complements (rather than replacing) smaller labelmakers such as the Brother P-Touch.

Machine works great (so far)... included software is buggy with memory problems. You may wish to print from 3rd party software.

I have a Twin Turbo, and that is a gem. But what do you do if you print stamps, return address labels and also 1st class & priority labels. Well you need a third and this was a wise choice. It will save on the cost of toner as well as time if you used to trim down 8x11 labels.

The only issue that I have is that if both printers are turned on, there can be some confusion between were the print job is going. Not sure, but I think that a second twin turbo might have cause a conflict.

I think they now make one that prints a thirn label, but it's a much thinner label.

I'm happy with mine.

I just love this machine. Now I don't have to waste a full sheet of paper to print one label. It is very fast. I don't know why I waited so long to purchase one. Best decision I have made on an office product in months.

This is a very useful device. Several times I thought that a device like this was no necessary if I had a jet printer and label sheets for my printer, but the paper used to jam if the sheet was previously used to print spare labels: standard printers and label sheets are useful to print a large amount of labels, not to print spare ones.

I don't know if this is your case, but I need more spare labels than bulk of labels. I use this printer to produce labels for folders, USB hard disks, diskettes, wine bottle, or to replace my handwriting in any envelope or package that I send.


The software installed flawless in my windows XP professional. After the software was installed, the printer was recognized as soon as I plugged it in the USB port. The software is easy to use; you don't need to study any manual. The printer quietly started to print immediately, the quality of labels is excellent. Maybe the size of the labels included with the printer is a bit large, but useful enough. Maybe you will need to buy some others. If you need small ones, you may need to Google for them (I could not find them in Dymo nor in Amazon). Anyway, there are lots of Dymo compatible labels in the internet.

Good printer, good quality, useful device.

The software for the labelwriter is truly awful and some of it damages other applications. If you use Microsoft Word with other applications that share startup manipulation of the Tools menu, you will find that the DYMO startup file, DYMOWordAddin.dot, will destroy all the other starup commands of applications such as Adobe pdfwriter, Endnote, and others. These applications will no longer appear in the menu, but the DYMO application will. This is doubly insulting because the DYMO addon is itself dysfunctional. The only safe way to create labels is to use the DYMO label application, which works reasonably well, although it too is unable to position graphics and writing with the necessary flexibility.

If you run into problems after installation, find the word startup folder and remove any addins with DYMO in them. This is a cross platform problem that involves Win XP and Mac OSX. Once the DYMO files are removed, Word returns to proper function.

The software is terrible, but the hardware is excellent. Although the labels are rather expensive, the printing is clear and crisp and one has access to all of the fonts on your computer. If is hoped that DYMO will put a greater effort into the software in the future so that their total product is as good as the hardware they sell.

I can only find one minor problem with this printer: no power button? In this day and age of energy conservation, it would be nice to not have to unplug it, but merely hit a button. I don't know how much power it consumes when idle, but it's just a thought.

Other than that, it works flawlessly (as long as you use the proper labels.) No jams, no binding, no hassles. Easy set up and fairly quiet too. The address correction software that came with it is quite useful. Come to think of it, I use the address correction software more than I use the labeler.

I couldn't believe how easy it was to hook this up to my PC and load the labels. I like the small design and its simplicity. It's also great that I never have to get a toner or anything extra other than labels. I used to use P-touch but this is better for files and folders. I highly recommend it.

We have business that provides payment choices for merchants. We were trying to print labels from the large sheets when we just needed a few. We ended up with wasted labels and jams in the printer.
Bought this Dymo label printer and wish I had bought the Dual printer to have the address labels and postage labels loaded at the same time!

I bought my LabelWriter thinking I'd use it occassionally for packages and file folders. Instead, I've gone label mad. It prints so quickly, and the labels are so cheap, that owning it has changed my work space completely. The label is finished in the time it takes you to move your hand from the keyboard to the printer. Under its influence, my file cabinets are becoming pristine rows of neatly printed black text, a far cry from the messy sharpie squiggles that I used to use. It's actually fun now to put information in its place.

It appears to be a little awkward to use compared to the Labelwriter XL. It worked early on and now I cannot get it to print my labels. Guess I should uninstall and then reinstall again to see if that will remedy the situation.

This is my second Dymo LabelWriter, and I would not know how to run a small business without one. We do a fair amount of first class mailing to the same people and it is much easier to quickly print a single label than to print an envelope.

The printer works very well. Excellent, in fact. The software could use a major overhaul, but does the job. It rates no better than a 3.

The unit is easy to set up and works right out of the box with no problems of any kind. The only thing is if you have it and another printer on the same computer you must choose it or the other printer when the print box comes up which is no big deal once you are used to it. Sure makes things easy around here.

Ed

These label printers are easy to use and are very reliable. I use one at home, one at work for Police evidence labeling and I resell them to other Police Departments for this use. We have been using ours for 2-3 years now without so much as a hickup. Don't look any farther, this is a great thermal label printer!

I use this item in my Home Office on a regular basis. The first I bought about ten years ago and it simply grew old. The new version is much improved. I'll look forward to another ten years.

This is a terrible product. If you can get it to print, the labels look great, but it will only print a few labels before stops for no reason that I can find. I get an error that it didn't print but no reason why. I've installed on two different PCs, one is brand new and same thing happens. Software is also pretty useless.
It also prints many blank labels which gets quite expensive.
The online help is a joke and the technical support take 48 hrs to respond.

This label printer looks and feels great, but the software is absolutely pathetic. It is bare bones software that is completely below my expectations and your expectations. I didn't expect the software to do anything fancy, but this software is of the 1980's quality.

More importantly, the specs indicate you can do a mail merge with MS-Outlook...that's a complete misrepresentation because you can't. What you can do with MS-Outlook is this - export you contacts database and import into the Dymo software. I was able to do it because I'm savvy with this sort of stuff, but 9 out 10 people won't be able to. So, if you're buying this with the intent of printing labels from your MS-Outlook address book, then don't buy it. If you're buying this with an open mind and willingness to go through a little bit of pain, make the purchase.

Worked great for a month. Manufacturer replaced 1 month later. Ebay was no help at all.Dymo Labelwriter 400 is not combatable with Vista. No upgrade patch or driver.

The Dymo label writer works wonderfully. Both the shipment and address labels come out very high quality. The software, although not quite user friendly, is relatively easy to handle once you get used to it.

I purchased 8 of these for my company to give to all of our sales reps and office admins. Before, they had to feed labels into printers, and I swear I lost a fortune in labor for each label. After researching all of the alternatives and models, I bought them through amazon, and got the 400. It prints so quickly, I can't even imagine the need for the turbo. It took about 5 minutes to set up, has a small footprint and is stylish, and is amazingly easy to operate... from a word document (think a letter to somebody), just highlight the address, and click on the little mini dymo icon right next to your printer icon. The software opens with the label in case you want to modify or put an automatic barcode, and you click print, and 3 seconds later or less, you tear off your label and put it on the envelope. That simple.

I only wish I had bought these for our office years ago. I think it's going to pay for itself in about 3-6 months.

I was all excited when my boss decided to get one of these to replace our typewriter labeling system. I remained excited until the first time I swtiched form one kind of label to another. After loading a diffrent label type I tried to print and nothing happened. Nothing happened the next 417 times I tried to print, either. Nothing happened after I tried all of the website's troubleshooting techniques. Then I called customer support. I put the phone on speaker and listed to hold music and promotional pitches for 1.5 hours before giving up. I hope they didn't throw away my typewriter...

I have two of the similar, earlier model 330, one at home and one at work. They have both suffered power supply failures, having survived through the warranty period but not much longer. Dymo's price for out-of-warranty repair is $75 each, which is a large fraction of the purchase price.

It is possible, of course, that the newer model 400 is more reliable. Or not.

It sits there quietly until you need to print a label and there is where it shows how useful it is.
It integrates beautifully with MS Word and Outlook.
It will check the address for validity and add bar codes.
Loading a roll surely beats loading a sheet of labels in your inkjet or laser and dealing with wasted labels and gummy jams.
In a time of multi-purpose gadgets, I appreciate that Dymo does one thing and one thing only; print good looking labels; and it does it great.

It has been 2 weeks and I have returned it twice. Software doesnt work and it doesnt print. Save yourself the stress and buy something else. NOT WORTH IT..

After using for over a month the priter, - for reasons unknown - fails to print - advances 1 label & shows printer errors thereafter

I bought the printer for one reason: to create shipping labels for my eBay items. I'd previously been using Avery inkjet labels with my inkjet printer, which worked but it was an annoyance to have to print only one or two labels at a time. THE GOOD: Absolutely no problems with the printer, getting it to work, etc. It has a very small footprint which I like, and it's very quiet when printing. It even comes with a roll of address labels. THE BAD: None significant, although the address labels are useless to me since I'll be doing nothing but shipping labels with it. The included software on the CD was old (updates available on the Dymo web site) but that holds true for pretty much everything in the computer industry. The software has some good features (mailing lists, and the ability to use the OS X Address Book database), but otherwise it's pretty minimal and limited, particularly in its design capabilities. This would have gotten five stars if it wasn't for the software, which feels like a hurried afterthought rather than a finished OS X application. (PS: Dymo has an OS X Intel-native version of the LabelWriter software that is available for download, but is NOT on the CD.)

I've been creating dozens of audio CDs from MP3 podcasts. I've used full size labels from sheets, but I was looking for an easier and more convenient solution. I decided to buy the LabelWriter 400 for this purpose.

The DYMO software is great. I wish it had a couple more features for precision placement of objects, but it seems to be pretty solid and functional. The software apparently works with any DYMO label that will work with the printer.

The CD labels work well. They adhere to the disk well, but it is possible to peel them off without leaving a lot of residue. These are small tables (2.5 inches O.D.), so they don't cover the whole disk. I wonder about how printed labels will hold up to sunlight. I think I'll test this and come back here to share the results.

I have 20 years of experience with PCs and software. I provide technical support and administer networks for a living. (In case that information helps you understand my perspective.)

PS. I raised a question concerning how the CD labels would hold up to sunlight exposure. I'm sure most people have some experience with thermal printing technology that produces persihable text. The supermarket I frequent uses thermal printers in their cash registers, and the receipts they issue fade with exposure to light. Though most recent thermal printing systems use materials that produce stable images, not all do.

I left a CD with a DYMO label on my dashboard of my car for a week. I can report that while the label may have faded very slightly, it is still readable. So I am confident that the DYMO LabelWriter 400 and CD labels are a practical and reliable combination.

I purchased a LabelWriter about a year ago and had nothing but problems with it. I exchanged the unit for a new one and surprise! surprise! have the same problems. Would not buy under any circumstances.

This LabelWriter is perfect for home office use. I use it every day for client mailings. It recognizes when you're writing a letter in Word and automatically offers to print a label. Extremely easy set-up and installation. Takes about 5 minutes to get everything out of the box and installed. It's also prints labels very fast. You do have to make sure the roll of labels are snug on the spool and when you first load the labels it does work best if you cut the first label in half so the machine knows where to line up the labels and you don't waste any labels. Has a small footprint and fits easily on my already overcrowded desk.

Here is my only minor and slightly weird complaint. There is no on/off switch and the LabelWriter has a blue light which is very bright at night. Since my home office is in my bedroom I have to disconnect the power cable at night to avoid an eery and weird blue glow that lights up half the room. (So far I've yet to remembered to do this before lights out.)