So why all of a sudden? Well, as it turned out, a Windows update was the culprit.
What made it more difficult to figure out is that nothing changed with our software – we didn’t apply an upgrade or update the Dymo drivers or anything. Can you imagine every visitor of yours having to wait several seconds for a name tag? It’s a bad image for both the customer and for us. It was a real mystery because for some customers it was working perfectly fine and others were having the issue, and were extremely frustrated. Our first issue with the Dymo 450 Turbo printer began when customers started reporting an issue with how long it was taking to print a label. Over time though, Dymo has forced us to change, as well as cost us significant dollars in support and engineering resources, making us rethink our commitment to their printers. Technically, we could use either one since we are typically only printing one visitor name tag at a time, so the speed of printing multiple labels isn’t a big factor for our application. The Dymo 450 Turbo was a little faster than the Dymo 450 standard and the price difference was negligible. We’d sometimes use self-expiring labels for applications that require it. We supplied the Dymo-compatible 30256 labels in batches of 10 that we’d supply from Dymo, Threshold, or Amazon. We specifically used the Dymo 450 Turbos with all of our kiosks and attended desktop visitor management stations.
For 5+ years, it was a really good solution for us at Savance, and we wholeheartedly recommended the Dymo lineup. It’s not the Cadillac, but it gets the job done. Thanks to its simplicity, affordability, and reliability, Dymo has been the de facto standard for most visitor management printing applications. You would think that would be a pretty easy task – to print a label using a thermal-style printer, and have it be easy-to-use and easy-to-maintain. We’ve really been struggling with visitor management printers over the past couple of years here at Savance, particularly with our visitor sign in kiosks to print name tags.