On Tue, 6 Apr 2021 17:53:35 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

snip

I use a Brother machine that takes TZ tapes.

Brothers do seem to come highly recommended here. ;-)

These are laminated tapes,
and produce good clear durable labelling.

Cool.

Tapes go from 3.5mm wide to 36
mm wide -

Feck, that's a banner! ;-)

although not all machines can take all the tape widths.

Understood.

I have
an old P-Touch 350 that will take 6 to 24mm tapes. Which covers pretty
much any standard use case.

Yeah, looking around it seems like for new, the PT-D400 is the best
price (~£50) and tape width (18mm) for the money.

https://www.brother.co.uk/labelling-...specifications

They also do a heat shrink tube tape.

Yeah, I saw that on Toolstation and they seem to support quite a range
of machines and tapes etc.

https://www.toolstation.com/electric...printers/c1023

This seems good and does up to 18mm ...

https://www.toolstation.com/brother-...printer/p77444

Lots of machines available - with quite a few industry specific options
(e.g. ones that can do network symbology, or electrical installation).

I saw them as well, ouch (well, new anyway). ;-)


https://www.brother.co.uk/labelling-...page=1#Results

(you can get third party tapes as well now, which are cheaper)

Yeah, I saw no end of tapes for the various models on Amazon and eBay.

So, depending of how much of the 16mm tapes the characters take up, it
could be either a D400 or PTE300VP new or something better (that takes
the 24mm tapes), second hand, hopefully for less?

What always worries me about second hand electronics that still cost a
bit is if they go wrong (no warranty etc)?

Cheers, T i m