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If you love a good poster, what you see in front of you is an instant gratification machine for creative types. Ultra-portable, under $300, full-color label machine that cuts the label as you print. You can go from an idea to a sticker on the back of your laptop in minutes, and you can do it anywhere there’s an outlet to power this device.
I’ve spent the past two weeks bringing this printer with me to family gatherings, parties with friends, and even to a coffee shop down the street from my house. Everyone I showed this printer to loved it and wanted a poster from it immediately. But when it came to owning one myself, I encountered a surprising amount of hesitation and questions.
This ultra-portable label printer can take you from idea to actual label in just minutes, which is more fun than you think.
Liene’s PixiCut S1 does exactly what it says on the box. You load the ink cartridge into the device, put a sticky note in the cartridge, and then everything else happens on your phone. The resulting decals are reasonably waterproof, hold up better than most under extended sunlight, and are just as scratch-resistant as those you buy from a quality artist.
I’ve printed labels with this machine that have survived several runs through the dishwasher and a full week of sitting in the California sun, with no visible signs of wear. These stickers hold up much better than anything I’ve ever made On Cricutand printing it was much less effort on my part.
After the printing process, the sticker sheet is individually cut using a Cricut-like tool built into the machine.
The big magic here is the built-in cutting tool. Like the Cricut, this single blade knows how hard it is to press down to cut paper cleanly and uses the same path as common artwork. 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.
Once color printing is complete, the paper is pulled back into the machine and the code starts working. And because this machine is only 11 inches long, you can put it in your backpack and take it with you anywhere. The same is technically true of the slightly larger Cricut Joy and Joy Xtra, but the quality of the Cricut labels is much lower and the printing and cutting process is much worse.
Liene’s software is reasonably intuitive and has plenty of options to explore. If you’ve designed your own artwork and just want to output it in poster form, you can easily upload the settings and adjust them to suit the type of cutting you want. If you like solid white borders or full-color bleed, the settings for that are as clear as can be.
Liene lets you organize everything on paper so you know exactly what you’re getting.
If you want to quickly categorize something, the in-app editor has plenty of options to make it look pretty. If you lack technical skills, there is a built-in AI tool that will produce something usable more often than not. It’s easy to line up multiple images, or copies of the same image, in seconds. You can use this program on a larger screen if that’s what you prefer, but I can’t say I’ve needed anything other than my phone to make something beautiful.
As much as I had fun with this machine, I don’t think I would go so far as to call this a professional label printer. The PixiCut S1 prints at good enough resolution with a color palette vibrant enough for many smart uses, but as I reviewed it, I found a consistency issue that will irritate artists trying to get their work into physical form quickly.
Cutting the same sticker 10 times does not result in 10 identical stickers. The position of the sheet, the size of the sticker, and the level of detail you want to cut can affect the quality of the cut in ways that are difficult to predict. Sometimes the label is perfect, other times I find a little white space where it shouldn’t be. It’s not a deal breaker to make an interesting poster every once in a while, but this kind of inconsistency is important to the artist.
The cut lines on these stickers can be cleaned up a bit with some careful adjustments in the app, but the default settings make a lot of little mistakes.
The printing process can be a deal breaker for the occasional home crafter who uses this machine. While thermal dye sublimation as a printing method is not particularly toxic, the PixiCut S1 will produce some noticeable fumes during a full-page print. This may temporarily irritate the eyes if you are nearby. This isn’t a big deal in a large or well-ventilated room, but it would be noticeable if you had him sitting at the kitchen table with the kids waiting for the latest hit of dopamine in poster form.
Speaking of kids using this, Liene isn’t great at accurately reporting errors. It can also be difficult to troubleshoot the cause of the paper jam or how to find out how much ink you have left. The support documentation for this printer is frustratingly insufficient. I didn’t encounter many errors, but when I did it took longer than it should to properly diagnose and fix.
When I sat down to write this, I found myself struggling to clearly define who this printer would be for. I’ve offered this printer to young home crafters to see the value in higher quality labels than they can make on their Cricut, but the price puts this model out of impulse buy territory and into something they plan to purchase when budget allows.
Sure, skilled people who sell at local events can enjoy making individual or custom labels with this printer, but most I spoke to have more options and greater quality control by working with companies like Sticker Addict. Each 4×6 sticker page costs about $1.75, which is good enough for one-off stickers but too expensive to mass produce anything.
Ultimately, this printer is great for people in between. If you want higher quality, custom labels in minutes from a printer you can easily take to most places, it has your name on it everywhere. You’ll sometimes feel frustrated when the printing isn’t perfect, and you’ll likely abandon this printing method if your artwork becomes a small business. But every time you succeed in printing and peeling off something you’ve designed, everyone around you will smile. I know I definitely did.