24 out of 24 people found this review helpful.
Hope you like Jamming, Slipping and Sliding
Date of Review: Dec 5, 2007
The Bottom Line: Avery labels have become the standard label of choice for many reasons, however, their performance was poor on a 90-sheet mailing but fine on a 5-sheet mailing.
Each Avery Mailing Label page indicates the direction of feed and the manufacturer claims they are jam free with Smooth Feed sheets that work from any paper tray. This eliminates the need for manual feeding. Perhaps, but this isn't quite the case on my HP Officejet 7210. They jam and they slip, their pages don't grip and the format gets completely messed up not to mention me.
A major mailing generated more than 2700 labels requiring 90 sheets and they were all fed manually, but not by choice. Can you hear the moaning now? Not only were they fed manually, but pages were sent separately (in threes and fours) but that was more a factor of the size of the file. I've selected Avery labels because of their reliability over generic labels but apparently it doesn't perform on every printer from any paper tray.
The Sheets
If you've managed a mailing project you know these labels. This is the Avery Easy Peel White Mailing Labels 5160. These are supported by Microsoft Word office software with formatting built in and it's easy to use. The labels also come in colors of red, green, blue, and yellow as well as clear. The sheets are 8 ? x 11 with 30 labels per sheet. These really do peal off easily and they are permanent adhesive labels. Volunteers of all ages and abilities can quickly remove and apply them to envelopes and they are probably the label of choice by the Post Office. The labels adhere to paper, cardboard, plastic, glass and metal. One time I printed the clear labels and applied them to clean, empty and never used, small water bottles for a special mailing that contained a treasure map. They worked perfectly and the Post Office accepted them. (That was several years ago, I don't know if I could repeat that particular mailing today.)
The labels are 1" x 2 5/8", perfect for four or five lines of text. These are mailing labels rather than return address labels, which are smaller. I've a stack of partially used label pages sitting around the office and when I need a few for an envelope or for re-labeling something I'll run the label manually by selecting the appropriate cells on the new page created in my Word document, for example in row four, column 2 (somewhere in the middle of the page).
Over time I've depended upon these for dependable quality printings. However, they've just disappointed me. They slipped, slid and jammed. I initially sent my entire project. The file was too large and wouldn't hold the document so I split it in half and sent the print job. The first two sheets went through fine and I returned to other tasks, but, imagine my surprise when finding more than three quarters of the document out of alignment with the labels. Some pages only had one row of printed labels or even half a row of printed labels. The final outcome was, rather than wasting 45 pages of labels again, me manually feeding them through, sending four or five pages at a time.
This may have a guaranteed printer performance on HP Laserjets, but the performance was far less than desirable on my 7210. They slipped and they slid. I will continue to use these for small mailings, and probably large ones if nothing else works better, but I will discourage any future large mailings because of this less than satisfactory relationship with my printer. We have a second HP printer, a LaserJet 8000N but the labels also jammed repeatedly in the printing process. That printer is networked in another room and is considerably larger and much more difficult to feed manually. I will recommend Avery labels, but with caution to watch your project on large mailings.
