Meet the Iron Man of industrial labelers
Working as a handheld printer or connected to a Windows PC, Epson's rugged, able LabelWorks LW-PX900 creates plastic, vinyl, fluorescent, reflective, and cable labels up to 36mm (1.42 inches) wide to meet most industrial labeling needs.
The largest label printer Epson offers—and arguably as large as a handheld printer can be—the company's LabelWorks LW-PX900 is a step up from the Epson LabelWorks LW-PX700 that earned our Editors' Choice award for moderate to heavy-duty industrial labeling. The key difference between them, and the reason you might want to kick up your budget to $299 for the LW-PX900 alone or $379 for the LW-PX900PCD Deluxe Kit reviewed here, is its ability to handle wider tape, up to 36mm (1.42 inches). It's also a smidge faster, offers higher resolution, and supports die-cut tapes, making the LW-PX900 a more robust labeler than the LW-PX700 and nudging it past the Brady BMP41 as our Editors' Choice winner for an extreme-duty industrial label printer.
Like its smaller sibling, the LabelWorks LW-PX900 has a handle on one end that makes it easier to carry the 2.78-pound printer with you. In overall shape, it's a near twin to the LW-PX700 and similar to the Brady BMP41 and BMP21-Plus, which is to say that its size varies depending on where you measure it.
I measured the Epson's depth (or length) at roughly 11.6 inches at its greatest. It's about 5.4 inches wide at its fattest, near the top across the 3.2-inch LCD screen, and 3.75 inches wide at the narrowest part of the handle. Its height or thickness is roughly 3.5 inches near the screen and an inch less at the handle end, so when sitting on a flat surface the top panel slopes down to make the screen easier to read and the QWERTY keypad easier to type on. Although you can hold the printer in both hands for thumb typing, I found it too heavy to hold comfortably for long.
The printer is mostly black with red highlights, plus white for a few function keys and lime green for the Print key and the slot from which labels emerge. The special functions include options for changing settings, defining labels suitable for patch panels and flag labels (with a small flag sticking out from the cable), and saving and loading up to 100 label definitions to and from onboard memory.
Physical setup is typical: Simply insert a tape cartridge and install either six AA batteries or the rechargeable lithium-ion battery, which you can buy separately for $79 or get as part of the Deluxe Kit. The Kit version, which is the one we tested, also includes an AC adapter that charges the lithium-ion pack, which Epson says will last long enough to print a bit more than four 30-foot cartridges worth of labels between charges. For backup, you can carry a spare battery or AA cells, or fall back on AC power. The power adapter's cord is just over 12 feet long.
Purchased alone, the printer comes with an AC adapter and one tape cartridge. For the price of the optional battery plus a dollar, the full kit also gives you a hard-shell carrying case ($59.99 separately) plus a set of two industrial magnets ($21) that screw into the printer's bottom so it will stick to any handy ferromagnetic surface.
At this writing, Epson offers 150 tape cartridges for the LW-PX900, adding about 30 choices to the types and widths available for the LW-PX700. Roughly half of them are 30-foot, standard plastic (polyester) tapes in assorted combinations of print and background colors with widths of 4mm to 36mm (0.16 inch to 1.42 inches). Cartridge prices are $20.85 for 12mm and smaller widths, $24.85 for 18mm and 24mm (0.71 and 0.94 inch) widths, and $34.50 for 36mm. All are continuous rolls, which means your cost per label will vary with label size.
The other half of your label choices are specialty tapes, which include silver matte; tapes with strong adhesive; magnetic tapes; vinyl, fluorescent, and reflective tapes; heat-shrink tube tapes for cables; self-laminating overwrap tapes for cables with a clear, unprintable area to overlap the printed text; and rolls with circular, oval, and rectangular die-cut labels. For each type of specialty tape, the length, pricing, and number of choices varies.
Like the LW-PX700, the LabelWorks LW-PX900 lets Windows laptop or desktop users download and print from Epson's Label Editor software (the latest version is 2.04), which also provides a driver that lets you print from other Windows apps. As I've mentioned in other reviews of Epson label printers, I find Label Editor both capable and easy to use. There's no support for printing from macOS, however.
Printing without an attached PC is also virtually identical to doing so from the LW-PX700, except for the options to use wider tapes and tapes with die-cut labels. Built-in features include being able to store and retrieve up to 100 label definitions; print bar codes and QR codes; print in vertical or horizontal orientation; print labels in mirror image; and use any of 859 industrial and professional symbols. One particularly nice touch is the Drop Stop option: Switch it on, and when you print multiple labels with a single command, the printer stops after cutting each label to wait for you to remove it from the output slot before printing the next one.
Epson rates the device's print speed on AC power as 35mm or 1.38 inches per second (ips). That's more than three times faster than the 0.4ips rating of the Brady BMP21-Plus and fractionally faster than the LW-PX700 (1.18ips) and Brady BMP41 (1.3ips).
In my tests, the LW-PX900 managed 1.2ips when printing four copies of a 4.6-inch label with the text "PCMag Label Printer Test" and automatic cutting turned off. When I set it for half cuts between labels, which lets you lift individual labels off a continuous strip of backing material after printing, the speed dropped to 0.89ips (including the final cut at the end). My times were the same when testing on battery or AC power.
Note that the unit's 360dpi resolution is double the typical sharpness of this class of printer and a bit more than the 300dpi of the BMP41. For most labels, the high resolution won't make a difference, but when I printed five lines of text on a tape slightly less than half an inch wide, it delivered crisp, readable 5-point text.
Each of the label printers mentioned here offers plenty of flexibility for its price, both in terms of its content (from bar codes to symbols) and the types of labels it can use. The Brady BMP21-Plus is the least expensive in the group and offers an ABCD keyboard layout for those who prefer that to QWERTY. The BMP41 is more directly competitive with the LW-PX900 and also available in specialized configurations that focus on different applications (such as the Voice and Data Communications Starter Kit we tested), so you might find a version tailored for your needs.
One advantage for the LabelWorks LW-PX700 and LW-PX900 is that they offer lifetime warranties, including for accidental breakage. The LW-PX900 has also passed the MIL-STD-810 four-foot-drop test. Both Epsons have identical Windows printing apps and almost identical built-in options, but the LW-PX900 is the only printer in this group that supports printing to tape wider than 1 inch. If you sure you'll never need labels up to 1.42 inches wide, the LW-PX700 is less expensive and remains our Editors' Choice pick for all but the heaviest duty. But if you know or think you might need the wider labels, the LW-PX900 is the printer you need, and rises to our flagship Editors' Choice pick.
Working as a handheld printer or connected to a Windows PC, Epson's rugged, able LabelWorks LW-PX900 creates plastic, vinyl, fluorescent, reflective, and cable labels up to 36mm (1.42 inches) wide to meet most industrial labeling needs.
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M. David Stone is a freelance writer and computer industry consultant. He's a confirmed generalist, with writing credits on subjects as varied as ape language experiments, politics, quantum physics, and an overview of a top company in the gaming industry. David has significant expertise in imaging technologies (including printers, monitors, large-screen displays, projectors, scanners, and digital cameras), storage (both magnetic and optical), and word processing.
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