PrintX Pro Review - User Reviews, Price, Where To Buy?

Like any other monochrome thermal printer, PrintX Pro Pocket Photo Printer Label Creator ($99) is not much of a photo printer, despite its name. Plus, all of the “pocket” or “portable” photo printers we’ve tested are color machines.

The printer PrintX Pro is however a good thermal mark, sticker, and receipt printer, and by far the smallest printer of the kind we’ve tested.

The label printer is not nearly as fast and flexible as Brother’s home-and small office-oriented P-touch Cube and P-touch Cube Plus.

But it prints easily and well enough to act as a lightweight, ultra-mini multipurpose labeller, sticker builder, and receipt printer for home and micro office use.

A Palm-Size Printer

PrintX Pro Pocket Photo Printer Label Maker Description

Available in white or pink, at first glance (and most of the online promo images I’ve seen the PrintX Pro printer looks like a cheesy, not-so-well-made, plastic toy, and the teddy-beared indentation on its face just reinforces that impression.

However when I took it out of the case, I was shocked by this small machine’s considerable girth and long-lasting construction quality.

PrintX Pro printer measures 3.1 by 1.7 by 3.1 inches (HWD) and weights 6.6 ounces or less than half a pound. (Much of that comes from a 1000mAh battery.)

These specs make the hair less than 1.5 inches smaller than the Brother P-touch Cube and the P-touch Cube Plus in all directions and more than half a pound lighter.

The design of the printer is impressively simple. There’s a seemingly accidental impression on the front of a teddy bear’s face.

On the right side, you’ll find a Mini USB port for charging (there’s a 12-inch cable in the box), and on the top edge there’s a hybrid power button/LED light that shows in green or red and flashes to signify different states, such as ready-to-use charging, low-battery and empty paper roll.

Also there is a manual tear-off cutter on the top edge, behind the power button.

Pulling the top section back slightly and then raising it opens the paper compartment, which houses 2.2-inch wide and 1.2-inch-core paper rolls.

Depending on the form of media or what you print (labels, receipts, etc.), paper rolls run from a few feet to 26 feet or more (we’ll look more closely at media size and cost in the upcoming How Low Can You Go section).

The printer comes with a single roll of regular non-adhesive thermal paper, much like a low-cost credit card receipt media.

Apart from that, everything else such as writing or entering text, uploading images and graphics, and printing, is happening in the PrintX Pro app, which is available for Android, iOS, and Windows.

How To Use PrintX Pro ?

How Good is it?

No-Brainer Installation and the PrintX Pro App

The installation consists of charging a printer with a mini USB cable attached to your device or a compatible mobile adapter.

Then install the PrintX Pro program on your Android or iOS device from the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, respectively.

Open the app and turn the printer on and print the QR code immediately.

The app prompts you to check the QR Code, which then pairs the two devices and the program with the printer via Bluetooth 4.0.

You don’t need to connect your printer with your smartphone or tablet through the former Bluetooth control panel.

Before reading the instructions, I tried that, and while my Android device saw the printer right away, it went wrong when trying to attach.

After locating and connecting to your printer, the PrintX Pro app opens to your home screen, ready to print.

PrintX Pro Pocket Photo Printer app home screen

A few of the six options on the homepage, such as AR (audio record) and Text Recognition (OCR) or optical character recognition for converting scanned text to editable text, seemed out of place.

I couldn’t find out why, for example, you would want to make recordings in label printer software, even though OCR is convenient to carry hardcopy text directly to your labels and other templates.

The PrintX Pro app offers a limited range of cliparts, including coloring-like drawings and puzzles, as well as some models for labels and lists.

You can also import graphics and images, and add text to build your own, and then save it to the Draft Box database app.

PrintX Pro Print Quality

PrintX Pro printer is a 203dpi (dots per inch) thermal printer, just around the same resolution as the Fine mode fax machine. (Comparatively, the Brother P-touch Cube Plus churns at 180dpi.)

Like the Brother model (and most label printers), depending on what you print, the PrintX Pro churns out text and black drawings fairly well and so-called grayscale images and graphics.

And like most label printers today, you can buy a lot of different colors and textures of paper to spruce things up a little.

As mentioned earlier, printer PrintX Pro is often marketed as a picture printer. But of course, this is only for applications where monochrome and so-called consistency is appropriate, such as stickers for children’s scrapbooks.

During my tests, I found that depending on the information and the degree of gray, the overall performance of the PrintX Pro machine was similar to the consistency of the newspaper.

A Work in Progress

The PrintX Pro label printer is suitable for marking, sticker and receipt printing and for printing black-and-white picture stickers and puzzles for children.

It’s a good low-end, all-purpose pocket printer that’s not really built to compete with traditional label printers. PrintX Pro’s $99 list price is a concern, though, given what’s available in that price range.

But we find it as low as $66.83 (It’s called Yosooo but we don’t recommend that), or as part of a few printer/multi-paper roll combo packs for less than the list price.

The PrintX Pro printer performs well enough to be useful around the house and elsewhere (maybe in a classroom) for the odd one-off label or sticker now and then and is durable enough and easy enough to use for children’s fun.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Compact and well-built the PrintX Pro printer produces good-looking labels, stickers, receipts and more at comparatively low running costs, but you lose speed and other time-saving productivity features in return.