Brother P-Touch PT-80 – You Certainly Won’t Lose It

One of the old label-makers we use at work finally died, after over eight years of reliable service. We had to find a replacement in a relative hurry and the only reasonably priced option our current vendor had in stock was the PT-80. It did have one advantage in that it uses the same labels as the old labeler that died. (This means a lot since the tapes are about $11.00 each.) We opted to purchase it rather than wait for other models to come available. We use the labeler to label each of our daily backup disks with the date of the backup and the type of backup.

The PT-80’s Strong Point
This device does have a couple of strong points. The first is the new color scheme that Brother adopted for this model is a bold move. Gone is the old, dark blue/ dark green color combo. Instead there is a new brighter blue and neon green. This thing is easy to spot from across the room. This may be appealing to you but then again, it may not. The second strong point is the one new button they have on this model, the Time/Date Button. This is a button that lets you enter the Time and/or Date with a single push of a button. Not only can you do this, the PT-80 allows you to configure what will be entered when you hit the button. This makes it the single most useful feature on this device.

Functionality
The PT-80 is nothing if not functional. It doesn’t do anything spectacularly, but it is adequate at most of what it does. It has many of the functions of its more expensive big brothers. There are nine different styles available (Normal, Bold, Outline, Shadow, Italic, Italic +Bold, Italic + Outline, Italic +Shadow, and Vertical). The old PT-85 we had, only had seven. It also has six Underline/Format options (Underline, Round, Candy, Callout, Banner, Wooden). There is also a very nice feature in a Num button that allows you to simply lock in that you are using Numbers. (One of the other labelers we have, you have to hold down the function key every time you want to type in a number).

The Weak Points
Unfortunately, this model does have a few weak points. Depending on what you will use this labeler for, these may make it the wrong choice for you. The first is the limitation of only one font. Most of the other labelers we have used have had at least two fonts. The limitation was not too big a deal for us, but could be for others. A more limiting limitation is that there are only two font size options. The old one had five. This can prove annoying when you want something in between. By far, the worst “feature” of this labeler is the Clear button. There is a backspace key that allows you to delete a single character at a time. If you hold down the shift key, it deletes everything. The other models we have, this just deleted all of the text on the line and that was all. The PT-80 changes this functionality to clear not only all of the text but all of your formatting options as well. It gets very annoying to change the text you are typing and print a second label only to find all of your formatting options have been reset back to the defaults.

The Bottom Line
I can’t say that I would recommend this labeler to someone wanting to do any significant amount of printing. The tape is expensive and with the new clear feature, it is far too easy to waste tape. In addition to being costly, it is impractical. If all you need is an inexpensive labeler for sporadic use, this may be a good, reliable solution. Try it before you buy it though to see if the “features” will adversely affect you.