By M. David Stone
Picking a category for the Zink hAppy Smart App Printer ($199.99) is a challenge. At the most basic level, it's a label printer. But it's not like any label printer you've ever seen—and not just because it prints only from tablets and phones. Like most label printers, it doesn't use ink. It uses rolls of specially prepared media that changes color when heated with a thermal printhead. Unlike the competition, however, it prints in full color. That, plus the photo-quality resolution, puts the Zink hAppy in a class of its own, as a label printer that's also a photo printer—a trick that's pretty impressive.
Compared with standard label printers—which for purposes of this discussion means anything that prints using only one color—the Zink hAppy is most reminiscent of the Leitz Icon Smart Labeling System. Neither looks anything like most of the competition.
The standard physical design for a label printer includes a transparent top cover that follows the rounded shape of the label roll inside. The Brother QL-700, which is our Editors' Choice low-cost label printer, and the Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo, our Editors' Choice high-end personal or micro office label printer, are both good examples. In both cases, to install a new roll, you lift the cover, mount the roll inside, manually feed the labels through a front slot, and then close the cover.The Zink hAppy and the Leitz Icon are built around a notably different design.
Changing the Way You Change Labels
The Zink and Leitz designs are both highly stylized variations on a box. More important, they both make it easy to switch between different rolls quickly, eliminating the need to manually feed the labels through a slot.
The Zink hAppy measures 3.75 by 4.5 by 4.5 inches (HWD), with white sides all around and a black top that slopes from the high point in the back to about 3.25 inches in front. To change from one roll to another, you press one of the two buttons on the top to rewind the tape back into the current cartridge, then slip the first cartridge out from the back of the printer, and slip the second cartridge in.
Once the new cartridge clicks into place, the printer automatically feeds the roll through slot. The entire process takes less than 30 seconds and makes it far easier than with most label printers to switch from one width roll to another as needed.
Basics, Setup, and Software
At only 1 pound 8 ounces, the Zink hAppy is easy to move or take with you. To make it even more portable, you can add an optional rechargeable battery ($49.99), which attaches to the bottom of the printer, adding 0.9 inches to the height and bringing the weight to 2 pounds.
You can connect the printer to a network by Wi-Fi, using an access point, and then connect to it with a phone or tablet through the access point. You can also connect to it directly, using the built-in Direct Connect Mode—equivalent to Wi-Fi Direct—which is the approach I used for testing. All you have to do is turn the printer on, set it to the right Wi-Fi mode with one of the two front-panel buttons, download the Zink Design Studio app to your phone or tablet, connect to the printer from your device, and start printing.
The app lets you create, print, and save templates for anything from folder labels to photo business cards to photos that fill the entire label. Individual labels can be as big as up to 17 inches long by the width of the roll. As is typical for label printers, the back of each label is self-sticking if you remove the protective backing.
I found the app easy to get started with, but hard to understand well enough to be sure I was using it to its best advantage. As tested, it also lacks some basic niceties, like automatically wrapping text in a text box. And I'd much rather be typing text on labels using a real keyboard rather than a screen on a phone or tablet in any case.
Labels, Performance, and Quality
Label rolls are available in five widths, with each roll measuring 19 feet, 5 inches long. Prices for the 1- and 2-inch rolls are $24.99 for a single roll or $42.99 for a pack of two. The 0.375-, 0.5-, and 0.75-inch rolls are all $19.99 for a single roll or $35.99 for a two-roll pack. All the rolls are continuous, with the printer's automatic cutter cutting each label to the appropriate size.
As with any printer that connects wirelessly, performance can change depending on how good the connection is at any given moment. However, Zink rates the printer itself at 0.15 inches per second (ips) in the default Vivid mode and 0.3 ips in Standard mode. As a point of reference, I timed the printer for a 4-inch long photo on a 2-inch-wide roll at 54 seconds, or 0.074ips. That's about half of the rated speed, but keep in mind this is the overall throughput, including the time needed to send the 300-by-300 dot per inch (dpi) image to the printer.
Image quality for the photos I tested with was good enough to qualify as true photo quality. Text quality is as good as or better than most label printers can offer, with crisp characters and sharp edges.
Fit, Finish, and Support
The one serious complaint I have about the Zink hAppy is the lack of polish for the app, the documentation, and the support. The printer itself scores nicely on fit and finish, but the app was unstable in my tests. It crashed multiple times, including three times in one 5-minute period. At one point, it simply refused to print for no apparent reason. Basically, it behaved more like a beta-test product than like something that should be released to actual users.
According to a Zink Holdings representative, the problems I ran into were likely due to the Android 5.0 version on my phone. Zink says that version has some problems with Wi-Fi Direct, which were solved with version 5.1. Zink also says that for phones that still use the earlier Android version, the company is trying to sidestep those problems with workarounds in the app. It's worth noting that I've never run into similar problems with other printers I've tested with Wi-Fi Direct with the same phone. But wherever the fault lies, the simple fact is that the app doesn't work well with at least some phones and tablets.
The Quick Start guide and overall support have much the same feel as the app of being not quite ready for prime time. In a section called What You Need, the guide indicates that an access point and high-speed Internet are required, neither of which is actually the case.
Armed with the assurance I had been given by a company representative beforehand that the printer supports direct connections, I managed to make it work. I also eventually discovered a reference to Direct Connect mode in the Quick Start guide. However, it comes eight pages after the What You Need section, and after the page that congratulates you on having set up the printer.
It doesn't help either that there's no additional documentation on the Zink website to help with setup, or that phone support is available only until 6 p.m. Eastern Time (ET) Monday through Thursday and 4 p.m. on Friday. If you're on the West Coast and run into trouble in late afternoon, you'll just have to wait for the next business day for help.
Fortunately, most of these issues are one-time annoyances that won't matter once you get the printer set up. The only one that you may have to live with is the somewhat limited app. The printer itself is impressive enough that if it were paired with a good enough app, it would be a candidate for Editors' Choice label printer. The app drags it down to the level of being merely useful.
Conclusion
For more traditional label printing that needs only black on white for folder labels, mailing labels and the like, the Zink hAppy Smart App Printer is overkill. Depending on your budget, consider the Brother QL-700, the Leitz Icon, or the Dymo 450 Twin Turbo instead. For full-color labels, however, the Zink hAppy is the obvious choice. Even with the limitations of the Zink Design Studio App at this writing, the Zink hAppy delivers enough to make it worth considering.
