Jeff McRitchie

GBC Ultima 35 EZload Product Review

The GBC Ultima 35 was introduced to the laminating machine market as an answer to a couple of needs. First, it was designed to be a low cost roll laminator that just about any business, church or school could afford. Second, they wanted to address the ongoing problem of users feeding roll laminators incorrectly and damaging their machines.

Strengths:

1. One of the first things we noticed (and liked) about the Ultima 35 is the extremely fast warm-up time of one to two minutes. This compares extremely favorably to almost any other machine on the market, and should be a big boost to productivity.
2. The big shining feature of the Ultima 35 is that it finally addresses the problem of inexperienced or distracted users loading the laminating film backwards on roll laminators. In other words, users who, quite by accident, load their laminators with the adhesive side facing toward the rollers. We don't know of you have ever done this on a roll laminator, but rest assured all it does is create a huge mess, and usually a service call is required at that point. The Ultima 35 has solved this problem by use of a specialized type of laminating film that has a different sized core on each side of the film. This makes it absolutely impossible to load the film the wrong way.
3. The Ultima 35 is pretty versatile, accepting roll film from 1.7 to 10mil thick. This means that you will be able to laminate just about any sort of document in all of the available rigidities. In theory, that is. For the first year that this machine was on the market 10mil film was not available. However, GBC recently released both 7mil and 10mil film for use with the Ultima35. Also, in 2008, GBC made available some matte films for the Ultima 35 in addition to their standard gloss films.
4. Some of the other things that we really liked about the Ultima 35 were that you can adjust the speed at which it laminates, which is great for laminating different paper styles and materials. Also, this machine has both forward and reverse functions helping with any wraps or jams that may occur. And finally, we really appreciated the inclusion of a handy built in trimmer to help with the finishing process.

1. We suppose one could consider it weakness that all of the supplies intended to be used with the Ultima 35 (such as laminating rolls) are proprietary. This means is that the user will be required to buy and use the rolls that are specifically designed by GBC to work with this machine. Unfortunately, these supplies are a little bit more expensive than other similar supplies that are available. However, this machine is so much lower in price (not to mention feature-rich) than most other similarly equipped laminators on the market, it may be well worth it in the end.
2. Though, as we mentioned above, you can't load the Ultima 35 the wrong way, loading it the right way is not the easiest thing in the world, and may take you a time or two to master. Once you've got the hang of it, however you should be breezing along.

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