Interesting Information About Standard Laser Label Sizes
The largest laser label is a full A4 sheet, 210 x 289 mm and the smallest is around 18mm x 10 mm. So if a manufacturer was to stock all the possible sizes in mm there would be 5,356,800 products.
If the manufacturer decided to stock gloss labels, matt labels, 6 label colours and 5 adhesives, plus square cut corners the total number of products would be around 400 million, if each label product took 1 mtr of shelving the shelves would go around the world 5 times at the equator. This manufacturer would clearly be insane.
Yet laser label suppliers get calls every day from customers who expect to be able to buy for example …21.5 x 76.3mm red labels with removable adhesive, and usually they are happy to be guided onto a standard size rather than pay extreme prices for bespoke labels.
Standard sized labels are made, stocked, purchased and printed in huge quantities every day, but why have the 40 or so standard sizes been chosen from the 5 million possible sizes?
The first reason is the size of the A4 sheet, 2 labels across a sheet with square corners would be 105mm and with rounded corners 99mm, similarly 3 across a sheet is 70mm and 63.5 sizes so these measurement crop up over and over again, so you can see why a 107mm wide label is never stocked.
The second reason is history, the 46mm x 11.1mm label size exists as standard because it used to be the right size to fit on a 35mm photographic slide, likewise the 145mm x 17mm fits on the spine of video tapes. Today these label sizes are used for all kinds of things and often the original use is obsolete.
The third reason is legality, often a standard size has a dimension with .1 mm added to it e.g. 99.1 or 11.1. This indicates that somebody registered the original design and so everybody else that makes it adds .1mm so that they do not infringe the design rights. Ironically it is then the 11.1 which becomes the standard rather than the original 11.
The fourth main factor is unit of measurement, by this we mean the conversion of, for example imperial to metric. So people ask for a 2 inch round label and so the size 51 mm standard, as is 63.5mm.
Different areas of the world have adopted different standard label sizes, in the same way that they have adopted different paper sizes. As a result it can be hard to source an American size in Europe. This problem only really arises when software is hard wired to a particular label size.
