Silhouette AmericaInc Cutting Machine, 0.5 Liters, White

This machine is absolutely excellent at it's job. It's fast, works well, and can cut shockingly good and accurate details. If you're not someone who's willing to watch an hour of youtube tutorials and fiddle around with depth & pressure settings for 15 minutes this isn't for you though. It takes a bit to get used to the software, get it to do what you want, and dial in the cutting settings. It's completely worth it though, once you learn it you know it and the software feels great to use. You'll also want to get more then one brand of sticker paper to see what works best for you.I've only had 2 issues with this device so far:1. Bluetooth connection is pretty inconsistent. This is probably because I live in a very densely populated area with high amounts of radio interference though (In a large apartment, another large apartment next to me, and out through my window is 2 more large apartments across the street). I do have issues with other bluetooth devices at times because of this at times, but not usually to this extent at all. I've found the device is only really usable over usb which is sort of too bad.2. One time, the software went crazy and no jobs would start. The cutter looked for the registration marks in areas higher then where the paper was even loaded. After some tinkering I solved this by simply restarting both the cutter and my computer and I haven't had the problem sinceI haven't had any of the issues with glossy paper I see anyone else mentioning yet. I'm getting absolutely excellent better-then-I-thought-was-possible precision using ppd-73-u paper. The paper is a little thinner then I'd like, but it is absolutely excellent in all other ways.

When I got this machine, it did not work out of the box, which is why I only give it 4 stars. I believe there is something defective in the blade that came with the machine. Though the red indicator line was changing, the blade was not sticking out, it was in the zero position. Though I could manually adjust the blade by setting it to the Manual blade in Silouette Studio, this kind of defeats its purpose. I switched to using the 1 mm Manual blade for better control, but it means having to pause the project to adjust the blade. Also, I found that there is an issue with the Print and Cut feature as the lines on the mat do not match with the machine's placement. It would cause difficulty in the machine's ability to scan the marks since the paper was being placed too low based on the mat's marking. I found a way to work around this. But it it shouldn't have to be like this. Other than these issues, the machine cuts well and I am happy with the purchase.

Ordered a Portrait after the Cricut Incident of 2021 (announcing we'd have to pay to upload more than 20 designs, backpedaling into doing it next year), and I have no regrets!There's a lot of comparisons to Cricut in this review (specifically, I had an Air Explore 2), so hopefully it helps people who are wondering whether they should get a Cricut or a Sihouette.I know I've seen a lot of bad reviews based on the software alone, but I haven't had any problems with it. I love that I can print directly from the software, and the quality is nice and crisp and beautiful. I also love that you can use a much larger area for the print/cut (something around 7.5"x10"), and that you don't need to log in to use the software and that everything is saved locally. You just drag and drop your design in from file explorer and there it is.To compare with the Cricut software:Print quality: Printing directly from the software results in awful quality. It's fuzzy and crunchy, because Cricut software prints a lower resolution image. In order to have something nice and crisp, you need to do a workaround that involves printing to PDF and editing/printing it in Photoshop (or other similar program)Print/cut area: With the Cricut software, you're limited to a 6.75" x 9.25" area to arrange your designs. You CAN do a full sheet, but again, you need to do a workaround for it.File management: it's a mess. You need to log in to your Cricut account to even use the software. If you want to use your own custom designs, you have to upload it to their cloud service. Nothing is saved locally.The machine itself it great! It's nice and compact. I don't need to cut anything bigger than letter sized so this is perfect. It's VERY loud though.If I could, I'd just knock half a star off because of the noise, and I couldn't get the bluetooth working (though a long USB cable works fine for running behind my desk). Definitely not worth taking a whole star off though!I would definitely recommend getting a Silhouette over a Cricut, even if they didn't have that whole Design Space fiasco.

I just used this for the first time today and honestly its amazing! It takes a bit to understand the software, but that would happen regardless of what cutting machine I bought. Once I learned how to use the software cutting was a breeze! You might need to tweak things a little here and there to get proper cuts (at that's what I did for my stickers) but once you learn which settings you need everything else becomes pretty straight forward. I did have one problem with the registration not working but setting it up manually (which is super easy to do, just use the arrows on the screen to move the blade to the black square) helped fix my issue. It only happened once, but even if theres a registration error again fixing it manually isn't really a hassle. I've only had it for a day now, but so far so good! My only real issue with this is the horrific sound it makes when cutting, but other than that I would recommend this to beginners like me!