Liene’s PixiCut S1 Is a Very Cool Sticker Printer Looking for an Audience

If you like good stickers, what you see before you is an instant gratification machine for creatives. A super portable color sticker machine, under $300, that cuts the sticker as it prints. You can go from idea to sticker on the back of your laptop in minutes, and you can do it from anywhere there’s an outlet to power this machine.

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

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

Liene’s PixiCut S1 does exactly what it says on the tin. You load the ink cartridge into the machine, insert a sheet of stickers into the cartridge, and then everything else happens on your phone. The resulting stickers are reasonably water-resistant, hold up better than most in direct sunlight, and are about as scratch-resistant as ones you’d buy from a high-quality artist.

I’ve printed stickers with this machine that have survived several trips in the dishwasher and a full week in the California sun, with no obvious signs of wear. These stickers hold up way better than anything I’ve ever done on a Cricut, and printing them took a lot less effort on my part.

The big magic here is the built-in cutting tool. Like a Cricut, this unique blade knows exactly how hard to press to cleanly cut paper and uses the same path depicted in the shared illustration. 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 color printing is complete, the paper is fed back into the machine and the blade gets to work. And since this machine is only 11 inches long, you can slip it into a backpack and take it with you anywhere. The same is technically true for the Cricut Joy and slightly larger Joy Xtra, but the quality of the Cricut stickers is considerably lower and the printing and cutting process is much 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 publish it as a sticker, you can easily download and change the settings depending on the type of cut you want. If you like a consistent white border or a full-color bleed, the settings for that are about as simple as it gets.

If you want a quick label for something, the in-app editor has a ton of options to make it look great. If you lack artistic skills, there is a built-in AI tool that will produce something usable more often than not. Aligning 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 create something pretty.

Although I had a lot of fun 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 vibrant enough color palette for many clever uses, but during my review I discovered a consistency issue that will quickly irritate artists trying to give physical form to their work.

Cutting the same sticker 10 times does not result in 10 identical stickers. The position on 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 difficult to predict. Sometimes the sticker is perfect, other times I find a little white space where it shouldn’t be. This isn’t a barrier to creating the occasional fun sticker, but this kind of inconsistency is important for an artist.

The printing process may be a deciding factor for casual hobby crafters using this machine. Although dye sublimation as a printing method is not considered particularly toxic, the PixiCut S1 will produce noticeable fumes when printing a full page. This can temporarily irritate the eyes if you are up close. It’s not a big 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 dose of dopamine in sticker form.

And speaking of kids using it, Liene’s software isn’t good at reporting errors accurately. It can also be difficult to determine why a paper is jamming or to determine how much ink you have left. The support documentation for this printer is woefully inadequate. I didn’t encounter many errors, but when I did it took longer than it should have to properly diagnose and repair.

As I sat down to write this, I had a hard time clearly identifying who this printer is for. To small hobby crafters, I showed this printer to see the value of higher quality stickers than they could make on their Cricut, but the price put this model out of impulse buy territory and into something they would consider purchasing when the budget allowed.

Crafty people who sell at local events might definitely enjoy creating unique or custom stickers with this printer, but most I’ve spoken with have more options and better quality control by working with companies like Addicted to stickers. Each page of 4×6 stickers costs about $1.75, which is enough for single stickers but expensive enough to produce anything in volume.

Ultimately, this printer is ideal for intermediate people. If you want better quality personalized stickers in minutes from a printer you can easily take to most places, this has your name everywhere. You’ll sometimes be frustrated when a print isn’t perfect, and you’ll probably abandon this method of printing if your art becomes a small business. But every time a print works and you pull out something you designed, everyone nearby will smile. I know I did it.