PixiCut S1 by Liene is a very cool sticker printer that is looking for an audience

If you like a good sticker, what you see before you is an instant gratification machine of artistic types. A sub-$300, highly portable, full-color sticker machine that cuts a sticker while printing. You can go from idea to sticker on the back of your laptop in minutes, and you can do this anywhere there is power available.

I’ve spent the last few weeks bringing this printer to family gatherings, parties with friends and even the coffee shop down the street from my house. Everyone I showed this printer to loved it and wanted a sticker from it right away. But when it came to owning it, I got a lot of doubts and amazing questions.

This ultra-portable sticker printer can take you from an idea to a physical sticker in minutes, which is more fun than you might imagine.

Liene’s PixiCut S1 does what it says on the box. You load an ink cartridge into the machine, put a sticker sheet on the cartridge, and everything else happens on your phone. The resulting stickers are moderately water resistant, hold up better than most in extended sunlight and are almost as scratch resistant as those you can buy from a high quality artist.

I’ve printed stickers with this machine that has survived many times in the dishwasher and a full week in the California sun, with no obvious signs of wear. These stickers held up much better than anything I’ve ever made on a Cricut, and printing them was very little effort for me.

The big magic here is the built-in cutting tool. Like the Cricut, this single blade knows exactly how hard it is to press down to cleanly cut the paper and uses the same technique featured in the shared artwork. 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 printing is finished, the paper is pulled back into the machine and the blade starts working. And because this device is only 11 inches tall, you can throw it in a backpack and take it anywhere. It’s technically the same with the Cricut Joy and the slightly larger Joy Xtra, but the Cricut’s sticker quality is much lower and the printing and cutting process is worse.

Liene’s software is reasonably intuitive and has many options to explore. If you’ve designed your art and just want to get it out in sticker form, you can easily upload and adjust the settings for the type of cut you want. If you prefer a solid white border or full color bleed, the settings for this are about as straightforward as it gets.

If you want a quick label for something, the in-app editor has many options to make it look good. If you’re not creative, there’s a built-in AI tool that will produce something useful more often than not. Combining 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’ve ever needed anything other than my phone to do something good.

As much fun as I’ve been with this machine, I don’t think I’d even call this a professional sticker printer. The PixiCut S1 prints with good enough resolution with a color palette bright enough for most smart uses, but during my review I found a consistent issue that will quickly annoy artists trying to bring their work to physical form.

Cutting the same sticker 10 times does not produce 10 identical stickers. The shape of the paper, the size of the sticker and the level of detail you want to cut 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 get white space where it shouldn’t be. This isn’t a shortcut to making the occasional fun sticker, but that kind of inconsistency is important to the artist.

One thing that might be a deal breaker for a home mechanic using this machine is the printing process. While thermal dye sublimation as a printing method is not considered particularly toxic, the PixiCut S1 will emit visible fumes during full-page printing. This may temporarily irritate the eyes if you are close. This isn’t a big deal in a large or well-ventilated room, but it’s noticeable when you find yourself sitting at the kitchen table with the kids waiting for their latest hit of dopamine in the form of a sticker.

And speaking of children using this, Liene’s software is not good at accurate error reporting. It can also be difficult to troubleshoot why the paper is full or how to tell how much ink is left. The support documentation for this printer is annoyingly inadequate. I didn’t encounter many errors, but when I did it took longer than it should have to diagnose and fix properly.

As I sat down to write this, I found myself struggling to clearly identify whose printer this was. Small home artists showed me this printer to see a number of higher quality stickers than they can make on their Cricut, but the price puts this model out of the realm of fixed purchases and something they can plan to buy when the budget allows.

Crafty people selling at local events can enjoy making one-off or personalized stickers with this printer, but most I’ve talked to have more options and greater quality control by working with companies like Junkie’s sticker. Each 4×6 sticker page comes down to about $1.75, which is great for one-off stickers but too expensive to produce anything in volume.

Ultimately, this printer is perfect for the average person. If you want high quality, custom stickers in minutes from the printer you can easily take to many places, this has your name everywhere. You will be frustrated at times when the print is not perfect, and you will probably abandon this method of printing if your art becomes a small business. But every time the print works and you remove something you designed, everyone around you will smile. I know I certainly did.