Stenn

Thanks to you both. ...and now that MZ points it out with more context, the difference in price between 28 (what I was thinking of) and 34 is so minor, it seems like a no-brainer.

Re: "...with the thousands made over the years, that servo motors have not come down..." It's not just the servo motor itself...it's the much more complicated servo control circuitry...so the whole cutter design using servo motors is more "complicated" than the simpler "digital" control of steppers.

Thanks... That's really incredible though...USB is cheap and universal, for more than a decade...REALTEK is the Daddy of cheap-but-universal chip-makers, EVERY PC uses them to go as cheap as possible...it's unfathomable any other chip would be implemented in a design that wouldn't be fully recognized and supported by Windows in 2019. It looks to me it's really the hardware that's the issue...the niche market of the vinyl cutter originally designed as a serial device 15 years or more ago?, that the Chinese clone-makers are just hodge-podge patching to work with USB, even to this day ? I doubt I'll be getting deep enough to justify Graphtec...but suspected rock-bottom MH was false-economy....so I was hoping the SC line was an adequate step up ?

What in the world ? Why, in this day and age, 2019!, would USCutter need to cut corners in the (new) SC design, by going with a "cheap Chinese USB chip" that "..isn't really USB..." ? I saw mention "we don't know who's building the SC yet..." ? Is USCutter not even involved in the design ? Is the SC just an odd, unknown Chinese-clone serial-port cutter with after-thought USB support ? I was about to buy an SC28, and connect USB2 or maybe even USB3 to Win10. Now I'm worried.

David replied almost a year ago that USCutter Engineering guessed this "whole job hold" issue was a "one-off" maybe affecting only a few machines...and there 's been no follow-up, at least not here. Coming from an Engineering design company I.T. and Quality Assurance background, I can't say that answer makes a lot of sense, unless the SC line is undergoing continuous hardware design changes since the introduction of the new SC....there shouldn't be any "one-off issues affecting only a few machines." If I understood the original report, the malfunctioning system is being fed by serial cable rather than USB, and there was a request for a null modem cable ? That's the variable in this equation that Cutter Engineering didn't explore...serial data communication...which has become quite rare in this age of multiple revs of USB...1, V.2., and now USB3....PC's have completely eliminated Serial ports for years, so I'm not surprised if SC serial behavior has not been fully tested. There's "Duplex" and "Parity" serial settings that are usually critical to proper function, besides just speed/baud rate...my first suspicion would be the Duplex setting (Full/Half), as that sets up 2-way or 1-way communication between PC and cutter...if set to 1-way/half-duplex, the PC would have to dump the whole job before the cutter could talk back. Does the same behavior occur using USB ?

Interesting... So, to sum up, there's really no agreement on an answer to Gary ? At first it sounded like there was..."anything bigger can be broken down to something smaller..." ...but then in comes "..34" is the way to go..." and "I wouldn't want anything smaller..." So it sounds like the real answer is... "It depends..." and we really need to figure ourselves out...intentions, "how deep..," etc.