Hi all,
We recently upgraded our Silhouette Cameo 3 to a Silhouette Cameo 4 Pro because we'd like to improve our workflow. We previously did everything on A4 which worked at the beginning but after attending more and more events, the manual labor got too intensive.
We invested in an A1 printer with the idea that we could upscale our production. Since the Silhouette Cameo 4 Pro could cut up to 24” materials and we were used to its little brother this seemed like the best upgrade since we had a good experience on the smaller scale. However, we soon experienced quite some issues when print and cut feature since we upgraded to the Pro.
It works decent enough on the A4 papers, but on anything bigger than that it just won't keep alignment across the page. It starts off well, the first row will be mostly fine. Somehow the second row is completely off and it only gets worse the further it goes. But it seems like it pulls it through too fast or doesn’t manage to recognise the size of the material. We tried perf cutting the stickers in the hope we could do it without a mat to save time. When cutting without a mat the material kept crumpling between the wheels and the blade. It seemed to have too much distance between the roller and the knife without enough material support to overcome the pushing force between the wheels and the blade.
Our workload consists of mostly:
- 24” wide laminated Polypropylene
- Die cut stickers, so an optical eye is a must for alignment/contour cutting.
We looked at a Graphtec CE 7000-60 which seems to work ish, but still wouldn’t be able to work without a carrier sheet. Without a carrier sheet cutting seems to work okay when kiss cutting the material. But when perf cutting we’ve observed the same problem as the Silhouette Pro had, it started to crumple the material. Our ideal situation would be when we could get rid of cutting with a mat since that would save tremendous amounts of labor.
A possible alternative would be a flatbed cutter, however, for 24” there does not seem to be an option within our budget. There is a smaller sized one, the Silhouette Curio 2 which may be an option but ideally we would want to support at least 24” materials.
A list of options we have considered:
- Graphtec CE7000-60
- Roland VersaSTUDIO GS2-24
- Silhouette Curio 2 (which can do 12”x12”)
- Silhouette Cameo 5 Plus (15”)
- Siser Romeo (24”)
Budget is about +- 2500 euros. Does anyone have advice on a good match for us?
Thank you!
