A little while ago the people at Niimbot were kind enough to send me one of their B3S mini wireless label printers to try out.
The B3S is a beautiful, little (115mm wide, 107mm deep, 58mm high) printer designed for blasting out labels. I say blasting because it prints fast. Really fast.
Unlike the Colop e-mark handheld printer which I tried out a while back, the B3S does not require any ink. It’s a thermal printer, which means a whole lot less mess and fiddling about but, it does also mean that the B3S cannot print in colour.
Form-wise the B3S looks a lot like a tiny, tiny regular desktop/office printer which, for some reason, makes me really happy.
So, what’s in the box? The B3S comes boxed with a USB cable for charging, a 70x40mm roll of 320 white labels, and a simple instruction manual. That’s all you need to get started.
The first thing I did after unboxing was to plug the printer in to charge, but I soon discovered that the battery (2200mAh lithium) was already at 70%. Which was nice.
On turning the B3S on, I discovered that all its menus were in Chinese. This wasn’t really a problem as the little screen on the front of the printer only conveys pretty simple messages like “Cover Open!” and such, or else self-explanatory stuff like charge, etc. I was able to forge ahead just using the instruction manual because I was excited to start printing.
Later, however, I realised that I could change the language on the printer itself just by navigating the menu using its two buttons (power/setup and paper delivery/select). It was very simple and easy, and the only real problem had been my own impatience. It does show, however, how straightforward it is to start using the B3S straight out of the box.
For those who are less impatient than me, a really simple and useful video guide can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJJK96Pe5lI
The B3S is wireless, connecting to your Android or iOS device via Bluetooth 4.0. You just need to download the Niimbot app. As with the Colop e-mark, the app is what you use to design, edit, save all your designs, and print from. For what it’s worth, I actually found the Niimbot mobile app a bit easier and more intuitive to use than Colop’s. Again, as with Colop, there is also a desktop version of the app, but I haven’t yet installed that and played around with it.
It took me a little while to realise that many of the available templates (which there are A LOT of in the app) are designed for some of Niimbot’s other printers. Again, this is probably more a case of me just forging ahead because I’m overexcited than anything else. Although the B3S can’t print in colour, lots of the templates are pretty colourful. That seems a bit weird until you realise that there is a whole range of different coloured and patterned labels which the B3S can print on. There are lots of images and other elements available that you can play with to tailor your design. Best of all though, you can really easily add and use any images from your device. This means you can create black and white (or black and whatever colour of label you choose) stickers of absolutely anything, and print them absolutely anywhere, so long as you have the B3S and your device.
The B3S is really fun to play around with, but it’s actually a pretty serious piece of kit. It’s mostly designed and marketed for business use: printing barcodes, price tags, shipping labels, etc. The B3S app also enables you to batch print from an Excel document, which I’m thinking is going to come in very handy for me when I have to post out a few hundred Graphic Novels in a couple of weeks…
Niimbot’s mantra is “the simpler, the better”, and the B3S definitely lives up to that in terms of ease of set-up and use. The speed of printing is pretty incredible, as is the quality which is honestly way, way above what I was expecting from a thermal printer. It’s fun, it’s functional, it’s very portable, very easy to use, and I think it’s going to come in very, very handy.
The Niimbot B3S is available direct from Niimbot for $89.99 USD (use the code “NIIMBOT” to get 15% off all orders!), or from their Amazon UK store for £89.99