Badgy A Desktop Plastic Card Printer By Evolis

Not Great, but not bad either I work at a High School and purchased this badge printer to make student IDs. I was deciding between the Badgy and the Pebble, and went with the Badgy because of its lower cost. After having had it for about five months, I'd say that it's a decent, if not spectacular product. The Badgy is well-constructed -- it's very easy to load cards into the printer, and the whole product feels very sturdy. It prints relatively quickly too -- you can do one side of a card in about 45 seconds, which is just fine as far as I'm concerned. Ribbons are easy to load, and I've never had a card jam in the printer. The Windows driver software is pretty nice too, actually -- I like that it notifies you when a ribbon has run out. My biggest complaints with the Badgy are in its printing. The color reproduction on the Badgy is disappointing. It's not awful, but it has a really difficult time with light colors, and small-ish fonts. It took quite a few prints and color adjustments for me to reproduce our logo in something close to its correct color. Lines were not ultra-crisp either. One thing I did notice however, is that it prints noticeably better with thicker cards. The Badgy comes with a "consumables kit" that includes a ribbon, cleaning kit, and one hundred 20mil cards which are pretty flimsy. They're nice for testing, but not really of the quality you'd ideally want to give out, either as IDs or giftcards. I purchased some 30mil cards from Amazon Marketplace, and the difference in color quality was noticeable. Everything printed crisper on the thicker cards. Once I discovered that, I was actually much more impressed with the print quality of the Badgy. The "software" that the Badgy comes with is basically an Excel spreadsheet with macros to do card layout. It's somewhat easy to use if you don't want to do anything other than use their templates, but if you want to do anything more customized, it isn't very easy, and doesn't work very well. There are a lot of badge printing softwares available, but in the end, I just used Microsoft Word to do the cards. I set up the fields I wanted to use on the cards as part of a merge file (you can merge images too), and created the cards that way. It worked really, really well. The Badgy is basically just a printer like any other printer, it just prints a very specific size. In summary, I think that as long as you know a few things about the Badgy -- buy 30mil cards and use those, and steer clear of its "software" if you want to do anything customized, you'll be happy. It's a well-built product that will last for several years, and can give you a lot of use. Rating: 4 (Badgy A Desktop Plastic Card Printer By Evolis customer review by Go Steelers!, 2009-12-17)

A really great printer for my business! Badgy A Desktop Plastic Card Printer By Evolis I have a coffee shop and this product has been a great tool for my business. I print my key customers loyalty/discount cards. I can keep track of how often they visit and reward them with incentives each time they come back. I also printed employee id cards that look sharp and professional. Rating: 5 (Badgy A Desktop Plastic Card Printer By Evolis customer review by J Martin, 2008-12-12)