If you love a good sticker, what you see before you is an instant gratification machine for creative types. A sub-$300, super portable, full color sticker machine that cuts out the sticker while it's printing. You can go from idea to sticker on the back of your laptop in minutes, and you can do this from anywhere there's an outlet to power this machine. 

I have spent the last couple of weeks bringing this printer with me to family gatherings, parties with friends and even a coffee shop down the street from my house. Everyone I showed this printer to loved it and wanted a sticker from it immediately. But when it came to owning one themselves, I found a surprising amount of hesitation and questions.

This super portable sticker printer can take you from idea to physical sticker in minutes, which is a lot more fun than you'd think. 

Liene's PixiCut S1 does exactly what it says on the box. You load the ink cartridge into the machine, pop a sticker sheet into the cartridge, and then everything else happens on your phone. The resulting stickers are reasonably water resistant, stand up better than most in extended sunlight and are about as scratch-resistant as those you'd buy from a high quality artist. 

I've printed stickers with this machine that have survived multiple runs through a dishwasher and a full week of sitting out in the California sun, with no obvious signs of wear. These stickers hold up much better than anything I've ever made on a Cricut, and printing them was considerably less effort on my part. 

The big magic here is the built-in cutting tool. Like a Cricut, this single blade knows exactly how hard to press down to cleanly cut the paper and uses the same path outlined in the artwork shared. The paper never leaves the printer, so the cutting part of the machine doesn't need a complicated calibration step to get the job done. 

As soon as the color print is finished, the paper is pulled back in to the machine and the blade gets to work. And because this machine is only 11 inches long, you can drop it into a backpack and take it with you anywhere. The same is technically true of the Cricut Joy and the slightly larger Joy Xtra, but Cricut's sticker quality is considerably lower and the process of printing and cutting is significantly worse.

Liene's software is reasonably intuitive and has plenty of options to explore. If you've designed your own art and just want to get it out in sticker form, you can easily upload and tweak the settings for the kind of cut you want. If you like a consistent white border or a full-color bleed, the settings for this are about as straightforward as they get. 

If you want a quick label for something, the in-app editor has a ton of options to make it look nice. If you lack artistic skill, there's a built-in AI tool that will produce something usable more often than not. Lining up multiple images, or clones of the same image, is easy to do in seconds. You can use this software on a larger screen if that's your preference, but I can't say I ever needed anything other than my phone to make something nice. 

As much fun as I've had with this machine, I don't think I would go so far as to call this a sticker printer for professionals. The PixiCut S1 prints at a good enough resolution with a color palette that's vibrant enough for a lot of clever uses, but in my time reviewing it I've found a consistency issue that will quickly irritate artists trying to bring their work to physical form. 

Cutting the same sticker 10 times does not yield 10 identical stickers. The position on the paper, the size of the sticker and the level of detail you want to cut around can all affect the quality of the cut in ways that are hard to predict. Sometimes the sticker comes out perfect, other times I'll find a little bit of white space where it shouldn't be. This isn't a deal-breaker for making the occasional fun sticker, but that kind of inconsistency matters to an artist. 

A possible deal-breaker for the occasional home crafter using this machine is the printing process. While thermal dye sublimation as a printing method is not considered particularly toxic, the PixiCut S1 will produce some noticeable fumes during a full-page print. This can momentarily irritate the eyes if you're up close. This is not a huge deal in a large or reasonably ventilated room, but it's noticeable if you've got it sitting on the kitchen table with kids waiting for their latest dopamine hit in sticker form. 

And speaking of kids using this, Liene's software is not great at accurate error reporting. It also can be difficult to troubleshoot why a paper is jamming or how to tell how much ink you have left. The support documentation for this printer is frustratingly inadequate. I didn't run into many errors, but when I did it took more time than it should have to properly diagnose and repair.

As I sat down to write this, I found myself struggling to clearly identify who this printer is for. Small home crafters I showed this printer to saw the value in higher quality stickers than those they could make on their Cricut, but the price put this model outside of impulse buy territory and into something they would plan to buy when the budget allowed. 

Crafty folks who are selling at local events could certainly enjoy making one-off or personalized stickers with this printer, but most I spoke to have more options and greater quality control by working with companies like Sticker Junkie. Each 4x6 sticker page breaks down to about $1.75, which is good enough for one-off stickers but pretty expensive for producing anything at volume. 

Ultimately, this printer is great for the folks in between. If you want higher quality, custom stickers in minutes from a printer you can easily take most places, this has your name all over it. You will occasionally be frustrated when a print isn't perfect, and you'll probably abandon this printing method if your art becomes a small business. But every time a print works and you peel off something that you designed, everyone nearby is going to smile. I know I sure did.