I chose to get a Brother P-Touch Cube Plus PT-P710BT printer. It accepts cartridges of thermal tape on plastic labels, from a quarter inch up to an inch. It is both bluetooth and USB, and works with Windows, Mac, and phones. It will do almost any font you might want. The labels are easy to print with the included application software and templates, and the backing is split so it is easy to take off and apply. The adhesive is excellent and removable. The printer has a lithium battery built in and is rechargeable thru the USB port. You don't even need a cable to use, it works with your phone over bluetooth. The printer is $89 on Amazon.
I redid the labeling for my narrow-spool tournament and skish casting reels display, with 42 of the selected production tournament reels from 1902 to 1968. I like to display my reels in date order, with the oldest to the newest shown. I have previous used laser-printed labels on paper, sometimes dry mounted to mat board. Those are hard to cut out using a framing mat cutter, and I had to glue them in place with a gluestick or rubber glue. The black print on white background also is a bit harder to read than the brother labels that I chose to be white print on black background. But you have a choice, just change the cartridges.
Start with an unlabeled case of reels, a spreadsheet listing all the reels, and the P-Touch Cube printer and software. There is an available merge function in the software that can print and cut long lists of reels, but I could not get it to format the way I wanted, so to save time, I just cut and pasted each description into the label software and did them individually using the function they call chain-printing. It prints and cuts the labels individually and optimally to save maximize the use of the cartridge. I should add that I calculated the size of each label to be all the same, and the software will format the descriptions to fit the chosen size. But in your case, you can vary the size to be anything you want.
I did end up moving a couple of the reels, which meant that I had to unpeal the old label and print a new one. I could have used the previous label, but they are cheap enough to just print a new one. Each cartridge is about $7, and contains 314 inches of tape, which for my 3.7 inch labels about 84 labels per cartridge. That is about 8 cents a label.
I have used these labels for other purposes, such as labeling cases and garden markers. I use a fancy botanical font for the metal garden markers, and they seem to hold up great, much better than the paint markers I used to use. You can't go wrong with this system, seems like every reel collector can use one. The bar is raised I think. You may know what the reels in your case are, but it is nice to label them so everyone else can know also.
