School me on vinyl cutters

[Dr Zero]

My friend has been eye balling a darn cricut and I'm not sold I want something I can hook to a PC. I might go for a cricut if there was like a cart you could load with your own stuff but I haven't seen anything like that yet.

So what is out there that is budget friendly but can make some decent cuts?

[MikeDeuce]

If you buy the right cricut model you can hook it up via USB, and you can run 'sure cuts a lot' (which costs money) as the software interface.

That said, I don't like it for vinyl (the GF has one). The cricuts uses a tacky cutting mat to control one axis of movement, and with the biggest machine you're still limited to cutting 12x24 (if I recall correctly)...

edit: sorry, had a meeting.

Anyway, so yeah... size limitation is a biggie. If your primary desire is to cut vinyl and really only vinyl, there's no reason to get the cricut. The cricut is for people that want to do more craft-oriented cutting (paper, fabric, and other very thin materials).

I use a small 12" one of these:
http://www.rolanddga.com/products/cutters/stika/

This was the other brand I was considering a few years ago:
http://www.graphteccorp.com/craftrobo/

I sold quite a few items here in B/S/T a few years ago, so I can vouch for mine taking a lot of my abuse. Price was a huge consideration for me, but if I had to do it over again, I'd probably go with something that accepts a more popular width of vinyl (like the 15" models). Any time I buy a roll of vinyl for mine, I have to chop it down at the saw to fit the 12" width.


Compared to a cricut, one of the nice parts about it is you just feed the vinyl into the machine, and it rolls it back and forth like a proper vinyl cutter (albeit slower)... No cutting mats necessary. On the software side of things, I just installed their drivers, and I cut directly from Illustrator (or any vector graphics app, really).

You can flip through my old threads to see the types of stuff I was producing:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=49291.0
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=51813.0

Also keep in mind that decent vinyl rolls aren't super cheap (I started selling stickers [at very reasonable prices] here just so I could afford to buy a bunch of different colors, and to pay for some of the machine), and weeding detailed work is time consuming... And if you don't have a ton of experience, you will make mistakes that can be frustrating. If you can deal with that, they're pretty fun little machines to have

[BobA]

My wife has 2 models of the cricut and I would recommend one of the more open cutters for you vinyl.   The cricut is limited by the program sure cuts alot which is and extra add on from another company.  Cricut trys to limit what you can do to their own cartridges and even the alternative is not that flexable.