Brady BMP51 - Voice and Data Communications Starter Kit

This is one of the label machines the company I work for requires us to use. The greatest benefits are its small size, small enough to fit into luggage and bring on a plane, and the label cartridges that integrate the ribbon, so that you don't need to buy ribbons separately like you do with some of the other Brady models. The BMP51 works great at first, but over time, as the inner surfaces gather dust, label glue, and tiny stray fragments of cut labels, the machine starts to feed inconsistently, to stop in the middle of a label, to inexplicably backfeed as if struggling to find the label notches, to skip several labels without printing, and/or to display occasional malfunction messages such as Out of Media or Invalid Media. Most of the time, these error messages are the result of the dust and grime. Following Brady's instructions to clean the components with isopropyl and compressed air helps dispel these messages for a few weeks. Sometimes you need to use a toothpick or tweezers to extract stray bits of label that are interfering with the feed mechanism. The kiss of death is when you start to see the error message Cut while printing. This error indicates the machinery is wearing out and will probably soon die, after which time the machine is useless. The BMP71 (that I used for a prior telecom employer) is a much more functional and faster Brady labeling machine than BMP51, and I've never had a BMP71 die. I know of at least two BMP51 machines that have died in the 2 years I've worked for the new employer. If your experience is anything like mine, you can expect one of your company's BMP51 machines to die per year.

Very nice and handy label maker.