Brother QL-810WC Ultra-Fast Label Printer with Wireless Networking,Black

Great printer for PCO’s Check-in App
We bought three of these printers to go with PCO’s Check-In system. We’ve been using them for almost 6 months. The only problem we had is where one of the printers is located with spotty wifi connections. There is no ability to hardwire the printer, so make sure you have good access points near the printer.Pros:- Easy set up on MacBook with Brother’s driver- Connects easily with Planning Center Online’s Check-In application- Quality design- Prints quickly- Cuts automatically- Large power brick with long cords- Includes printer to USB jack for a printer cable for easier setupCons:- If you have spotty internet, you will need to make sure you set the printers up as Static IP Address- No hardwired ethernet cable option (only WiFI)- It would be nice if it has a display screen when you have an error and for set upI highly recommend this Brother printer for anyone who is looking to do digital sign-in and print sticker labels with PCO’s Check-In system!

Endless Network Connection Issues
I bought two of these printers for our church to use with Planning Center Check Ins to print labels for children in our programs. We had previously used two Brother QL-720NW printers which performed very well on Wifi with the check ins app. These printers have put us through 3 months of agony as they randomly disappear from connection in the Check Ins app, particularly when there is a long line of people trying to check their children in. I am no amateur when it comes to network troubleshooting. We have hired firewall experts and followed all recommendations for making this work, including port settings, firewall settings, network settings(separate VLAN), and troubleshooted all potential issues with access point radio 2.4 GHZ. Tested exhaustively. They show up in the planning center app and invariably disappear. I know about the sleep setting and it is turned off. Two times when I had the printers connected to my PC to check the settings they stopped communicating through the USB cable. I contacted Brother Support and after explaining all of this to two separate agents the result was giving me a support number to call. I will call the number soon when I have time but I don’t to be honest have high hopes of getting any kind of satisfaction from this transaction because what I need is our church’s money back since I have already ordered the bluetooth model, which allows me to avoid the network nightmare altogether, which is what I should have purchased in the first place, but I had no idea this would occur since the previous models were very stable on our network. I am sure this review makes me sound probably a bit crazy but this has been the worst experience with tech equipment I have ever had as far as troubleshooting and repeated failure to perform and I have been buying equipment for tech use for many years.

Can’t imagine not having this now
I use this daily for business and it is amazing!

3 out of 5
Works great when it’s working. This is the 3rd one I have purchased because they easily get clogged up and they are very difficult to fix once that happens.

FINAL EDIT: MAC users, you need to manually edit settings for BEST quality. See my text and final comparison photo.EDIT: MAC users! READ THE END BEFORE PRINTING!Can print wirelessly from your PC/Mac or Android/iOS device. The app is a little rudimentary but works just fine.Wish your saved files could somehow sync or be exported between devices (Dropbox? OneDrive?) but that’s ok. There seems to be an issue with graphics, however. Printing detailed graphics to the QL-810W comes out muddied compared to our 5+ year old QL-550. See my photo for comparison. Unknown why this is happening, but have reached out to Brother for comment. The test photo was print from the desktop app at the same time.Overall, the wireless function IS worth it if your workflow includes printing directly from mobile device. If it’s going to be tethered to your desktop/laptop, then the QL-800 is a better buy.EDIT: I’ve managed to figure out more about the quality discrepancy. For some reason, the Mac software installed the AirPrint version of the QL-810W driver which caused graphics to be very unclean with random dots and blotchiness (see photo). After forcibly changing the driver using Mac CUPS (sorry, need to Google that can’t link), it prints BETTER but still not on par with the very old QL-550. Note this has nothing to do with wired vs wireless or paper types. Tested all those scenarios and the result is the same. What you CAN see is that the printed scale of the print is different for some reason between the QL-550 and QL-810W. I can’t find any setting discrepancies so still investigating…FINAL EDIT: Brother was no help, so I dug into CUPS (the print manager in Mac). By setting to “Error Diffusion” and “High Resolution”, I finally got output that is worthy of the upgrade. Note that these options are NOT exposed in the Print dialog box. The quality drop down offers “Priority Speed”, “Priority Quality”, “High Quality”. When you actually print, there is only a simple slider for draft/normal/best. Note that even setting to “best” doesn’t give the result in my photo. For comparison, the QL-550 only has “Priority Speed” and “Priority Quality” but also has error diffusion which was used in the print samples.

I ordered this for use with a Mac. The installation instructions featured the wrong model, but looking the printer up on the brother support site was easy. If you are on a Mac, you will need to download the Brother P-Touch Editor from the App Store. If you are using wifi, make sure to connect the printer using the CUPS driver and not AirPrint, otherwise the software will fail to connect.