Best Brother ScanNCut CM100DM Home and Hobby Cutting Machine with a Deals

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List Price: $399.00
Sale Price: $388.47
Today's Bonus: 3% Off

I am an avid crafter and I own a variety of other digital and manual cutting machines. I enjoy them all in one way or another. What intrigued me about the ScanNcut was the ability to fussy cut my rubber and clear stamps quickly and easily. All I have to do is stamp my image on cardstock run it through the machine, highlight the cut area on the onscreen display and decide whether I want it to cut with margins or not. Quick and easy and the machine cuts so well. I am very impressed.

It cuts thicker paper nicely (unlike my Cameo) and it does small detailed cuts really well (which my Cricut cannot always do).

I have tested this machine with stamps.

Fussy cutting elements from pattern paper.

I have cut chipboard and bazzill.

I have welded letters onscreen to form words.

I have scanned in shapes I have found on the internet to make cut files.

I have made cut files from my own handwritten designs.

It has done well at every job. I wish the screen were a bit bigger, and I wouldn't mind a stickier mat (though using painter's tape to hold the edges of paper works really well), but all in all and I am thrilled with this machine and I love not having to turn on my computer to use it. I give it 4.5 stars.

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You can't hook it to a computer but you can bring images in with the USB port. Save an image to the flash drive and plug it into the machine.

Best Deals for Brother ScanNCut CM100DM Home and Hobby Cutting Machine with a

Update: This machine is saving me so much time cutting clipart. As the saying goes, time is money. I did a lot of cutting with this since I received it mostly in the direct cut mode which is what I bought it for. This is what I have discovered: It does not like anything pastel or flesh colored like hands (I drew a line around my clip art in another program before printing and solved this issue). You need to keep things away from the edges or it will not outline to cut. Make sure your paper is very attached to mat or it jams after it scans

I make and sell favor boxes and I use a lot of clip art which I have been hand cutting and this works perfectly to cut out my characters and saves tons of time. I do not think it will replace my Cameo but that's OK. I do like that it does not need a computer.

The mats are expensive and do not last very long...the edges breakdown and will not load. This is a negative!

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Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program I saw this in the Vine program and thought it would be an interesting thing to try. I have a 10 year old son so I can picture a few uses for it, and despite all the technology in my house, I have nothing that can do anything like this. So keep in mind, this is coming from someone who never used one of these before, didn't even know they existed. If I can use it, I would imagine someone who actually knows what they're doing and how they can put crafts together should be able to do some serious magic with it.

Unboxing is easy, it's reminiscent of a printer, removing the tape holding things together and in place, and just one bit of cardboard around the pen holder to remove.

I had not given any thought prior to getting this to wonder how things are held for cutting the large mat is somewhat tacky on the top surface, so you pull the protective plastic off of it, and place what you want to scan, or what you want to cut, on that.

Today we were studying state capitals for his fourth grade test. We have eleven states from the south east of the US that he's memorizing the names, capitals, and abbreviations for. His teacher had handed out work sheets with just the outline of the states. So I thought that would be the perfect thing to give it a test run with.

I placed that on the mat, selected the scan option, and scanned it to the device. You can scan to USB stick if you want as well. That went fine, and I was able after the scan to select on the touchscreen what part of the scan I was interested in. I selected the area with the state outlines, selected, and saved it. I would've been more impressed if it let me name my files I save to the device, but it gives them arbitrary names. I guess they felt that with the browsing ability on the screen, you can find what you want by looking at the images themselves. I still would've preferred a naming ability.

It scanned fine, so now it was time to do some testing. I happen to have some black construction paper laying around, so I cut a piece down to size, put it on the tacky mat, and set it up for the cutter. The instructions give you a little diagram showing different materials and what settings to choose for both the machine and the knife, so I got the knife set to the right number (simply twisting the end which makes the blade protrude more or less) and selected my scanned image from the device's memory. I had anticipated it would cut the outline of the entire area rather than each individual state, but to my surprise, it actually cut every line it saw in the scan.

Anyone who has used a plotter will be used to the movement. In and out, left and right, it just kept jumping the knife around and moving the mat as needed.

Inside of about three minutes, it pushed the mat out with the finished product (I've uploaded photos to demonstrate). I have to say, I was very surprised. Other than a couple spots where it didn't quite cut completely (a couple state corners, but it was a very low quality source picture to start with so that's not a shock) everything was ideal.

The provided spatula helped me lift each state off of the cutting mat, and my son was ecstatic since he loves puzzles. Immediately he was taking them to the table to put together.

The unit is small, and the construction is very solid. Since there's almost no moving parts externally, there's nothing that feels like you could pop it out. The odd thing is the display I over pulled initially and yanked the supports out of the unit so it was loose. Fortunately it's well built, and it was easy enough for me to get the little braces back where they go and it works just fine now. It supports three positions for viewing, and I had been expecting something that simply ratcheted via friction to hold any angle, like my printers do.

All told, it floored me how well it worked with someone like me doing some simple tests like this. I scanned a few more shapes, some simple solid figures, others a little more complex. And everything I tried to cut, came out just as it should.

For people who do this for either a living or just as a hobby, who will really be able to use it to it's advantage, I think it's a pretty impressive little tool. I personally like the ability to scan, since you can't plug it into your computer and send things to it directly, so at least this way if you can't get a compatible format to save to a USB stick to plug in, you should at least be able to print out what you want, then just scan it and cut it.

For the price, it's pretty impressive, even to a neophyte like myself. I've already got some ideas percolating in the back of my head that I'd like to do with the holiday seasons coming up.

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Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program I'm not new to craft cutting machines. I've had theCricut Mini Cutting Machine, Cricut Expression Electronic Cutting Machine, and Silhouette Cameo Starter Kit Bundle Cutter. I thought that since this machine is Brother brand and advertises it's ability to cut appliques, that it would work with my Brother embroidery machine, but it won't. I had even seen a machine in my local sewing shop and they said that it could cut appliques with the PES software, but after contacting Brother, they said that is false. The embroidery machine and the Scan N Cut use completely different files and there was no way to use them together. So, that was a big let down. I have software for craft cutting machines that works on my Silhouette Cameo and my original Cricut Expression, but won't work on the Scan N Cut because all the other machines take SVG files, but this one takes FMC files. I read on the website that Brother is working on cloud based software that will allow me to convert all of my SVG files into FMC files, but I wonder how much that will set me back? I like the scanning feature, but don't like that 99% of the things I want to cut I can't find a clear image for. Even when I do find a clear enough image, I have to waste ink printing it out on my printer, then scan it in and try to edit, size, and move the image on the tiny screen. I much prefer using a computer screen with the virtual mat, then just positioning the paper to be cut on the mat and pushing cut.

I did attempt to cut Oracle 651 vinyl on the machine following the settings recommended in the little start up guide. It recommended cutting on a blade setting of 4 on the turquoise blade. That cut way too deep. When you cut vinyl, you only want the machine to cut through the top vinyl part, not all the way through the backing, so I tried it on 3 and it was still too deep, so eventually I set it on 1 and that was perfect. It cut through only the top layer leaving the sticker backing so I could peel away the negative space and use transfer tape to apply my vinyl to my project. I cut card stock successfully using their recommended blade setting of 4, but it left deep cut marks in my mat, so I reduced it to 3 and that worked fine without such a deep cut on the mat. I would definitely recommend playing with it to see what your preferences are. Cutting that deep all the time will wear your mat out in a hurry and they are pretty costly. Which leads to my next issue with this machine. The replacement mats and blades are more expensive than the replacement items for the Cameo. The tools that this machine comes with look like toys in comparison to the Cricut and Silhouette brand tools. The edges aren't sharp enough to really get under things and there's no hook tool at all for weeding vinyl.

My overall thoughts on this machine are that they should have waited until they had the SVG software to release it. They really jumped the gun. As is, it doesn't even compare to the Silhouette Cameo's design capabilities. They should also be very clear in their advertising that this machine doesn't work along side the embroidery machine to applique designs. I'm learning that many other people thought they'd work hand in hand as well. If they release some amazing software that makes this thing great, I'll update my review, but as of right now, I say go for the Cameo instead. The scanner is very nice on this and it would be a great machine if it had the design capabilities that other machines have, but it just doesn't. My fingers are crossed that they get it figured out and release something. It has so much potential.

*Update*

Since writing this review, Brother Released the Canvas program on 11/08/13 that allows you to design projects on your computer to cut on the Scan N Cut in an online program. It works ok, but doesn't allow you to download svg's as of yet. The Brother website say's it's coming, but it the ability to cut or convert your SVG files is not available yet, and my biggest gripe about the software is that I still have to put my design on a flash drive and plug it into the machine. I wish it was like other cutter programs that allow you to use a printer cord to plug your computer directly into your machine, then do everything on your computer, but feed the mat and change the blade depth. This still has a long way to go to compare to those programs. I would still recommend the Silhouette Cameo and software over this.