Liene Pixcut S1 kiss-cut prints and stickers

I’ve used a million printers over my decades as a computer nerd and professional photographer. I used to print professional 11 x 14 matte images like they were going out of style on the old Canon Pixma Pro9000. Less so nowadays with electronic ink frames and everything so digital now. But the Pixcut S1 is not that kind of printer… this thing can print and cut stickers! And who doesn’t love stickers?

It’s really quite simple:

The wife was the first to get her hands on it. I sat idly while she figured it all out, not that there was much to do. It comes with an “ink” cartridge, an 18-pack of 4 x 7 sticker paper, and an 18-pack of 4 x 6 photo paper. Two minutes later, he downloaded the app and was creating. I emailed her a graphic I wanted to print as stickers and she used one of the existing templates…and those were the first two sticker sheets.

Then she designed some “get well soon” stickers for her friend’s daughter, who had just had a run-in with a barbed wire fence (and lost), and printed them, too.

It’s actually quite interesting how it uses AI to create a border around the “kiss cut” sticker. That is, it has a blade inside the machine that just cuts through the surface sheet of the sticker without going all the way through the paper, leaving you with a bunch of stickers die-cut on the 4 x 7 sheet as soon as it finishes printing, without having to touch the machine. try to do that with a Cricut.

The Pixcut S1 zooms in and out of paper, one layer of color at a time. Kind of like CMYK, but more like a YMC plus one sealer coat to make your prints waterproof, UV and scratch resistant. And I put “ink” in parentheses before because it’s not traditional liquid ink, it’s actually a 4-layer printing ink sublimation thermal transfer. So the little zipper on the inside of the print head actually heats the dye ribbon in the cartridge and transfers it over one layer of color at a time. And it’s pretty fast! Less than a minute for a photo and about two or three minutes for a full sheet of cut-out stickers.

Liene says you’ll get about 36 sheets (stickers or photos, it makes no difference) per ink cartridge. Liene sells refill packs when it’s time to restock: 72 sheets of 4×7 sticker paper and two ink cartridge refills for $43, or 72 sheets of 4×6 photo paper and two ink refills for $34 more on Amazon.

Statistics at a glance:

• Printing type: 4-layer dye sublimation thermal transfer
• Resolution: 300 x 300 dpi
• Photo size: 4 x 6 inches
• Sticker size: 4 x 7 inches
• Print speed: ~59 seconds per photo
• Cutting: Built-in contour cutter, up to 2 ips
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.0; Android/iOS and some kind of PC app
• Capacity: 36 sheets/36 prints per ribbon cartridge
• Size: 11.1 x 7.7 x 4.1 inches (281 x 196 x 104.5mm)
• Weight: 6.4 lbs (2.9 kg)

A Liene representative emailed me saying there is a PC app for the Pixcut S1. Personally, I’m not a fan of using my phone for tasks that I can perform significantly faster, more efficiently, and with higher quality using my computer… so I downloaded the app, installed it, connected the printer via USB-C, and instantly realized that the app was incomplete, as if Liene had released unfinished software. I wanted to print a photo, but I didn’t have options for 4 x 6 photo paper. Turns out, yes, the PC app isn’t fully developed yet.

So I went to my phone! I took the Android version and Bluetooth pairing with the printer was very easy. The app is a little cheesy with a million community suggestions and ready-made AI, but there’s a big fat “CANVAS” button right there so you can skip all that nonsense and start doing whatever you want. It’s really easy and intuitive. It took me 30 seconds before my first photo printed.

I printed out some high-quality photos I’d taken with my Canon DSLR (on L-glass, of course!), and the final product was pretty solid. It prints at 300 dpi, but it’s not like an inkjet printer, where it creates little dots to form an image. It’s more of a continuous tone, so 300 dpi looks much sharper than you’d expect.

I printed three consecutive photos. The second one came out of the printer damaged, with a big scratch. Because? I don’t know. Then I looked at the printer and the rollers and saw nothing wrong. A total of three sheets of stickers and four photos were printed, and that was the only one with any type of imperfection/damage.

The photo paper is perforated on both ends, and when I saw it, I groaned to myself, thinking about the soft, feathery edges, or maybe even tears trying to remove the edges of the sheet. To my surprise, it looks more like a flexible closure piercing. Bend it once, it will crack. Fold it the other way and it will come off cleanly. Definitely high praise to whoever thought of that.

I did the math on the economics of this thing, and if you’re primarily using it to punch left-to-right photos for your scrapbook, your local CVS or Walmart or something is much better off running out of a ton of 4×6 photos. The Pixcut will run you about ₵47 each in short. Walmart will do it for 18₵ each.

On the other hand, the breakdown is a little better if you print stickers. Obviously, that depends on the size of the stickers you’re making… one per page is around 60₵, but if you put together five or more stickers per sheet, the cost per sticker will be pretty good. Especially for low-volume, fully customized sticker runs.

For example, if you want 50 1×1 custom stickers from StickerMule, it will cost you $47. That’s about ₵94 each. With Pixcut, taking into account the ink and the three sheets of contact paper you’ll use for the same task, it will cost you about $1.90 total… or about 4₵ each. The math is correct.

The cutting blade is also replaceable. Liene says it lasts about 700 sheets before it’s time to buy a new one for $13. Not bad.

And the Pixcut S1 is small, about the size of an average woman’s shoebox, so it doesn’t really interfere with anything (unless, of course, you have 50 pairs of said shoeboxes). While the paper tray is stored inside the machine (the place where a paper tray is expected to live and function), when you want to print with it, you have to take it out of that storage compartment and stick it into the feeder at the back… and it sticks out, so you’ll need a little space behind the printer when you use it. That part is a little annoying. C’est la vie.

All in all, this is great and I will definitely use it for my little projects around the house and with the kids. I’ll probably make stickers for our oldest son’s class or something. Have a lot of fun making stickers, that’s for sure! And if you’re the Etsy type, I imagine this $280 printer + starter kit will pay for itself in no time.

Product page: Liene or Amazon

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