Tip: Dymo Rhino Labels work in Consumer Units Too

There's a tread where replacement parts (say, ink, filters, hard-drives, etc.) cost incredible amounts. That's not bad by itself, but some companies go further and start adding DRM to their replacement parts (looking at you Apple and HP), which is completely anti-consumer.

Dymo is an outlier in this market, no DRM, and their replacement tape is reasonable, IMO. That said, they do attempt to create artificial market segmentation - mostly between their Rhino "Industrial" labels and their consumer LabelManager labels. Of course, Dymo doesn't even acknowledge that these two label markets share the same label cartridge format (at least for the sizes that LabelManager supports).

Every vendor that I've found says the two labels are incompatible, well, except one, McMaster, who, in their "McMaster way", lists every unit that works with Rhino:

A screenshot of the McMaster product page showing a table of Rhino labels, all of which are compatible with consumer LabelManager units — McMaster is a engineer's joy

So, on a whim, I got some nice, white-text-on-black, permanent-vinyl labels to hopefully counter my "none of my labels stick to my curved plastic containers for very long" problem.

On the left, the D1 LabelManager labels and on the right, the rhino labels, both appear identical — I cleaned my workbench for this picture!

And yes, the cartridges are mechanically the same. The Rhino labels just seem to work, which is awesome. Rhino has a much larger variety of materials which I appreciate. The D1 LabelManager labels all use polyester plastic, which just don't have the durability of say, vinyl plastic.

Here are the labels in-use, storing most of the screws I use for my 3D-printing projects.

Small containers of metric screws, each labeled with their specifications in high contrast white-on-black text — I use a lot of Torx

I suspect that some of the Rhino labels might have issues, if the printing head differs on the LabelManager's. I'm not completely sure where this compatibility ends, but I do want to try another materials to see what works. Maybe I'll update this post later with the results.