I got a Brother label printer in the sales. No driver for XP x64 was supplied but the Vista x64 one works perfectly. It seems that the printer subsystem did not change much between XP x64 (based on the Server 2003 kernel) and Vista.
Print quality isn’t bad. Blacks are very deep and should hopefully stay that way since it’s a thermal printer and does not use ink. That also means no smudging. It’s 300 DPI which is fine for labels and some basic graphics like logos and barcodes.
The supplied P-Touch Editor software is okay. All the usual functions are there for working with text, except for a spell checker. It can generate barcodes too, including QR code. The interface is actually pretty good, presumably because this is a business printer and so forgoes all the usual consumer oriented fluff. I have not tried the Address Book software yet as it looks like it’s oriented to mail-merge tasks, but there is a MS Word plug-in which lets you select an address and print it directly from the context menu. It seems to work well enough.
The printer can use both separate label rolls and continuous rolls, and comes with one of the latter. It has a cutter built in which slices the roll up automatically. Unlike the Dymo at work it’s very quiet too, in fact you don’t realise it’s printing until the cutter kicks in. Even set to quality mode it’s pretty fast too, printing a 62×50mm label in less than 1 second and taking about 1.5 seconds to cut it.
Oh, and being a Japanese company Japanese language support is naturally excellent. For example, you can enter Japanese text into the barcode generator which is something most online ones can’t do.