Colop e

The Colop e-mark ($349.99) is a unique palm-size inkjet printer designed for printing labels, bar codes, rubber-stamp-like artwork, and other imprints on a variety of media ranging from paper and label stock to cloth and packaging material. Marketed as a stamping and imprinting device (perhaps the first electronic alternative to a rubber stamp), it has no rivals or competitors that I can find. The e-mark prints well and at a reasonable running cost, especially compared to the Brother VC-500W color label printer that copped an Editors' Choice recently. Overall, the e-mark is a well-designed, well-performing device with a variety of applications for both homes and small offices. Despite a quirky mobile app and a high price tag, the e-mark takes home our Editors' Choice in an all-new category: e-stamp printers.

As you can see in the image below, at 2.9 by 3 by 4.4 inches and weighing just 1.1 pounds, the e-mark is exceptionally small. In fact, most of its size is designed to house its sole ink cartridge, which I'll get to in a moment. It also comes in two colors, white and black.

In addition to the printer itself, your $349.99 (the price I found at Amazon; it's $399.99 at Staples) gets you a docking station for charging and protecting the printhead, as well as a dust cover that keeps the device clean while not in use (shown in the image below).

Colop also offers an $18 carrying case, shown here:

Connectivity consists of mini-USB (cable included) or Wi-Fi Direct, though you need the supplied power cable and adapter to charge the printer. Both the power and USB ports are located on the back of the device, and you can design and print labels from the bundled software on a Windows 7, 8, or 10 desktop or laptop or an Android or iOS handheld.

The e-mark runs on a battery that delivers hundreds of prints between charges and takes about three hours to charge when fully drained. You'll find the on/off toggle, as well as the printhead and a set of rollers that aid in the sideways motion required to make it print, on the underside of the device.

Setting up the e-mark is simple, though not necessarily straightforward. I install and set up gadgets nearly every day, but probably wouldn't have figured out how to put this one together without the well-illustrated setup guide in the box. The trickiest part is installing the tricolor (cyan, magenta, and yellow) ink cartridge, which entails removing the battery and opening a small hatch on the bottom of the device, as shown below.

As mentioned, the Colop e-mark app comes in three flavors: Windows, iOS, and Android. Overall, the software is robust and comes with an abundance of templates, typefaces, and clip art; a QR code and bar code generator; and a date, time, and numbering generator. That last one, naturally, allows you to create stamps that update themselves according to when they're imprinted or to stamp objects in sequence.

The e-mark software works similarly to Brother's P-Touch and other label-generating apps. I found it easy enough to use, but after installing it on my Android smartphone, I kept getting screens from the operating system's control panel asking me if I wanted to keep the Wi-Fi Direct connection to the printer and another message from the e-mark software telling me that I needed to turn off the phone's mobile data functionality to ensure uninterrupted connectivity.

I also installed the e-mark software on our standard Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Pro. While it looked nearly identical to the mobile version, it connected to the device and functioned without incident or mishap.

After designing your labels, you send them to the printer over Wi-Fi or USB. The e-mark itself can hold up to three imprints that are easily replaced from your computing device. You can scroll through the imprints on the device, changing which of the three is active, by tapping the top of the printer.

Printing is simply a matter of dragging the printer over the material on which you want to print. A set of guides notched at the center boost your precision.

Since it's so dissimilar from other printers, assessing the e-mark's print speed is difficult. Basically, it prints as quickly as you can align it and drag it across a surface; the typical numbers such as pages or labels per minute are irrelevant. You can print up to three imprints consecutively as fast as you can tap your finger to switch between designs and drag the device across the areas you want to print. You can also print two different stamps in succession by dragging right and then left.

Keeping in mind that the maximum print size is 0.55 by 6 inches, the graphics and photos that you import into your designs aren't really big enough to display a lot of detail and high quality. That said, the e-mark's print quality is well above what it should be for its intended applications. I saw few or no jagged edges or grainy images, though quality and detail varied greatly depending on media. Cloth is, for example, much more absorbent than most paper types, so naturally print quality and detail degrade somewhat on softer materials. Overall, though, I've no complaints about output quality.

Most impressive, though, is the e-mark's ongoing per-imprint cost. The tricolor cartridge lists for $42.99 and is rated at 5,000 prints with 15 percent coverage. Using these figures, I calculated the e-mark's cost per print at 0.9 cent. Furthermore, after shopping around some, I found the cartridge for as much as $10 less online.

Aside from its price and finicky Android software, I was impressed with the compact Colop e-mark. It prints well and inexpensively, and it or products like it may well be the next-generation replacement for the ancient and inflexible rubber stamp technology. With the e-mark, you have a wide range of flexibility for imprinting all sorts of messages and labels on many different types of media, from labels and envelopes to cloth ribbons and napkins. I wish it was a bit less expensive (and I suspect it will be before too long), but as the only e-stamp product I know of, it's a shoo-in as our top pick for an electronic imprinting machine—not to be confused with e-stamp postage devices.

The Colop emark, though a bit pricey, is a well-designed, unique "digital rubber stamp" and imprinting device that prints your text or designs on a whole host of surfaces and materials.

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