If you look closely at the official DYMO labels sold in recent years the packaging has changed color. The color was DYMO seeding the RFID stock into the market. Once saturated they launched the 550 with RFID.
The chip inside each roll is a special NFC that identifies the label dimensions and remaining label count. The NFC comes pre-loaded with 0xFFFF-Count in a special register that increments when hit with a non-password protected NFC command emitted by the printer when any label is ejected. So even if you don’t print, you just eject, the labels are depleted. There seems to be a buffer at the end for this kind of “rewind” process or user error … but it’s limited. A roll of 50 labels might have a counter that can be hit 60 times. The command to reset this counter is password protected.
There are many label converters (print shops that make blank labels) bent out of shape about this. Moreover, there are entire industries (think dental offices) that have standardized their processes around custom die cut labels made specifically for their use case. Since DYMO won’t bless the labels, they will never work in the LabelWriter 550.
When the 550 was launched I started hearing about it from my customers. I bought one off Amazon and the reviews were terrible. A few weeks later I checked and DYMO deleted the 550 product page and renamed their older 450 to become the 550, effectively inheriting the thousands of decent reviews from the 450… hiding the upset customers of the 550.
Just remember that DYMO is owned by private equity. I used to communicate with their dev team and they’ve gone silent. I got in contact with a few ex employees and they saw the writing on the wall… they bailed.
Anyways. My shameless plug:
I develop and sell label design software and I support DYMO, Brother, ROLLO, Zebra and a dozen other brands of thermal printers.
I’d love to offer a bundled solution to compete against DYMO… but I’ve yet to find a decent 300 DPI thermal printer with a positionable gap sensor and <1” print width. If someone knows of a printer with those specs please get in touch with me using the contact form on my app’s website: https://label.live
It doesn’t work. There’s an authenticity layer to the NFC they’re using. You can scan the rolls with Android NFC readers to get an idea of the tech involved.
Linux support is often requested in HN comments (but not so much from other users). I'll be sure to post to HN if/when I add it! Printing to DYMO via CUPS should work on macOS/Windows. I just added MDNS/IPP support so anything being "shared" as a network-discoverable printer should automatically display in the in-app printer list. Let me know via the app website if you run into any issues. I'm happy to help!
If you look closely at the official DYMO labels sold in recent years the packaging has changed color. The color was DYMO seeding the RFID stock into the market. Once saturated they launched the 550 with RFID.
The chip inside each roll is a special NFC that identifies the label dimensions and remaining label count. The NFC comes pre-loaded with 0xFFFF-Count in a special register that increments when hit with a non-password protected NFC command emitted by the printer when any label is ejected. So even if you don’t print, you just eject, the labels are depleted. There seems to be a buffer at the end for this kind of “rewind” process or user error … but it’s limited. A roll of 50 labels might have a counter that can be hit 60 times. The command to reset this counter is password protected.
There are many label converters (print shops that make blank labels) bent out of shape about this. Moreover, there are entire industries (think dental offices) that have standardized their processes around custom die cut labels made specifically for their use case. Since DYMO won’t bless the labels, they will never work in the LabelWriter 550.
When the 550 was launched I started hearing about it from my customers. I bought one off Amazon and the reviews were terrible. A few weeks later I checked and DYMO deleted the 550 product page and renamed their older 450 to become the 550, effectively inheriting the thousands of decent reviews from the 450… hiding the upset customers of the 550.
Just remember that DYMO is owned by private equity. I used to communicate with their dev team and they’ve gone silent. I got in contact with a few ex employees and they saw the writing on the wall… they bailed.
Anyways. My shameless plug:
I develop and sell label design software and I support DYMO, Brother, ROLLO, Zebra and a dozen other brands of thermal printers.
I’d love to offer a bundled solution to compete against DYMO… but I’ve yet to find a decent 300 DPI thermal printer with a positionable gap sensor and <1” print width. If someone knows of a printer with those specs please get in touch with me using the contact form on my app’s website: https://label.live