If you love a good sticker, what you see before you is an instant gratification machine for creative types. A sub-$300, super portable, full color sticker machine that cuts out the sticker while it's printing. You can go from idea to sticker on the back of your laptop in minutes, and you can do this from anywhere there's an outlet to power this machine.
I have spent the last couple of weeks bringing this printer with me to family gatherings, parties with friends and even a coffee shop down the street from my house. Everyone I showed this printer to loved it and wanted a sticker from it immediately. But when it came to owning one themselves, I found a surprising amount of hesitation and questions.
Liene Liene PixiCut S1 Sticker Printer This super portable sticker printer can take you from idea to physical sticker in minutes, which is a lot more fun than you'd think. $260 at Amazon
Liene's PixiCut S1 does exactly what it says on the box. You load the ink cartridge into the machine, pop a sticker sheet into the cartridge, and then everything else happens on your phone. The resulting stickers are reasonably water resistant, stand up better than most in extended sunlight and are about as scratch-resistant as those you'd buy from a high quality artist.
I've printed stickers with this machine that have survived multiple runs through a dishwasher and a full week of sitting out in the California sun, with no obvious signs of wear. These stickers hold up much better than anything I've ever made on a Cricut, and printing them was considerably less effort on my part.
After the printing process, the sticker sheet is individually cut using a Cricut-like tool that's built into the machine. Russell Holly/CNET
The big magic here is the built-in cutting tool. Like a Cricut, this single blade knows exactly how hard to press down to cleanly cut the paper and uses the same path outlined in the artwork shared. The paper never leaves the printer, so the cutting part of the machine doesn't need a complicated calibration step to get the job done.
As soon as the color print is finished, the paper is pulled back in to the machine and the blade gets to work. And because this machine is only 11 inches long, you can drop it into a backpack and take it with you anywhere. The same is technically true of the Cricut Joy and the slightly larger Joy Xtra, but Cricut's sticker quality is considerably lower and the process of printing and cutting is significantly worse.
Liene's software is reasonably intuitive and has plenty of options to explore. If you've designed your own art and just want to get it out in sticker form, you can easily upload and tweak the settings for the kind of cut you want. If you like a consistent white border or a full-color bleed, the settings for this are about as straightforward as they get.
Liene's app allows you to organize everything on the sheet so you know exactly what you're going to get. Russell Holly/CNET
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