BOSTON - At Macworld Expo, Seiko announced this week a new line of "smart" label printers, reaffirming its support for the Mac platform at the same time. Thomas K. Fulmer, National Sales Manager, took some time to demonstrate the new printers and their accompanying software for The Mac Observer.

The new software works fine with Tiger, and helps save time by allowing you to use information from the Mac OS X Address Book when printing labels.

The software knows about a large variety of label types, has templates for common uses, and has flexible layout options which can auto-resize the font based on the amount of information on the label. This option eliminates the problem of having labels that look too sparse or too crowded.

Thereis also support for a serialize mode, so one can print a series of labels with unique ID numbers without having to enter each ID manually. Plus, thereis support for several barcodes symbologies. One can even download the software to check out the features, though you probably wonit get too far without the label printer.

The New Smart Label Printer 430

There are three models available immediately. The 410 can print a label in 8 seconds, up to a width of 1 1/8". The 420 can print a label in 8 seconds, and can print labels with a width up to 2 1/8". Finally, the 430 can print a label in 3 seconds, at a width up to 2 1/8". The estimated street price of the units in US$99, $129 and $179 respectively.