Niimbot D110 - a pretty good buy.At a price that puts it into the class of the Dymo thermal labellers, this is a pretty capable machine.
I bought this little Niimbot D110 printer three years ago. I needed to label parts bins and drawers, and found dozens of uses for the labels besides. (I got waterproof labels because there was a deal for the printer and four rolls. Each roll has a strip of 210 labels.) The whole deal, printer and labels, came in at AUD$48 back then in 2021.
Labelmania. Of Course.
You know how it is. You get a label printer, you label everything in sight and then look around for more. First thing I printed a label for was the printer itself, with a return phone number if I ever lost it. The printer's been carted around in bags and pockets but the sticker is still shiny and as legible as when I printed it. (I won't post a pic of it yet because there's more, so much more...)
If I left it unused for a few weeks - yes, that did happen sometimes - the first label would stick and print misaligned. I could live with that, just hit print a second time and the next label would be perfect.
I am so happy with it that I made a graphic for this article. Since I had to change the label roll, and then realised that it was the first roll change, I thought I'd give it this article for a Refill Day gift... That's when I realised that it uses RFID paper disc labels to tell the printer what label stock is inside.
It doesn't have a label counter, but a spare roll is the size of ... of ... - let's just say that a mini can of Sprite would be too big to sit on it. And well packed in a sealed foil bag. The centre piece there is smaller than a soft drink bottle lid. And the printer's about the size of two decks of cards stacked atop.
But Does It Come In All Different Colours?
(And props to whoever gets that reference...)
No. It's a thermal printer so two colours is all, the label material and the thermal ink material. You can also get rolls of cutesy labels that are printed with hearts or unicorns or kittens and the thermal ink prints through, but I needed labels, durable labels, and the water/oil proof ones were the duck's guts as far as I was concerned.
Well Then Does It Come With An App?
Oh yeah. The worst thing about the app is that your labels can be saved to the cloud, and if you lose your password then any labels on that account are yote forevva... (yep - bitter experience talking there, upgraded phone, downloaded new copy of app - and bugga...)
But that app. It takes a few labels to get it right but once you do, it can do tricks. Also - resolution and sharpness. Bear in mind that a label is 15 x 30 mm in size:
These blew me away. The top image is a small section out of a phone camera shot I cut out and pasted into the editor app, on a day when I just happened to be going to the hospital for day surgery. I didn't reduce colours, I just let the app decide what would be black and what smudges on the wall would be considered white. That sticker's been on the lower bezel of my monitor since Feb 2022.
The lower image has two stickers, the top one from 2021 when I labelled the label printer, the second when I realised that I could print smaller URL QR codes and they could be read by most modern phone cameras. Don't worry - I was Not An Expert at that stage and managed to prepend some garbage to the URL, and the server I set up was a test server so it probably won't work by now. But it's a 14-character piece of text and my phone can read it perfectly well even now after scraping along on the printer for the last few years.
Guerilla Marketing
I think the QR code was the eye-opener for me. Nothing Dymo produces comes close to how useful the D110 is. And I think that the particular QR code I used was for a "leave your contact details" page or something. I can't remember, my online strategy was all "suck it and see" still. But it included an email and the mobile number again. I think. It could also just have been a "Hello World!" page.
But later when I had a few tools to sell off, I printed six stickers pointing to another temporary page with a picture, a price, and my phone number. For a spare set of calipers, a screwdriver set I'd never used, that sort of thing. At that stage I was constrained by not even thinking about using URL shorteners to keep the QR code readable at that tiny (~12-13 mm square) scale.
I also printed a few guerilla marketing stickers for a local fruit & veg grocer but because they had an phone from last century their camera couldn't focus so they didn't use them. When the person was going bust, I showed him how any modern phone camera could resolve the advert, and sadly went back to having to drive miles to farm gates and farmer's markets for reasonable quality fresh F&V.
As I said, my breakthrough for that came with ReBrandly.com, another URL shortening service like bit.ly. BTW ReBrandly is one of the few I know that lets you create a URL shortening service with a domain name you already own in the free tier. That's very unusual.
(Disclaimer: I'm not posting this for gain. I just started using ReBrandly a few months ago and realised that they offer such a lot on the Free tier that despite them being slightly more costly than the older Bitly, if my donations go up to the point where I can do so I'll definitely be paying tier to them. Oh and yep that's definitely a hint for you to scroll down and seriously consider if you'd like to donate the price of a few lattes a month to me. Bear in mind that as coffee prices go up over the next few months, that'll equate to just the cost of one cappuccino a month. That's a really good investment considering I post between ten and twenty articles a month...)
Check It Out
Anyhow - Niimbot make a few label printers as you'll have seen if you followed any of the links I've strewn around the page, and searching for them on AliExpress and selecting a store with a good reputation you might even get a better deal than I did. To get the durable labels, search for "water oil proof 15 x 30 210 pcsW" or something similar on whatever store you got the printer from. Hint: Buying a 3-pack always works out cheaper, and as they arrive well-sealed in a pouch, they look like they could well outlast civilisation itself.
Okay - I'm off to stick labels on things.
Before I go, check out the section below. It has various magical properties, like letting you copy the URL of this page to share, bookmarking it to remember later, a rolled-up newspaper icon to let you check out a list of my latest twenty articles and subscribe to a once-a-week newsletter, and a few ways you can donate and help me out with running the online presence and subscriptions to news sources I use for researching.
Ciao!
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