Presented as a good choice for smaller
printers and copy shops, or for businesses that want the ability to do
their own business cards fast, the BCS210 is a business card slitter
meant to work with the ten-up layout. Here, we will
take a look at the BCS210 and give you what we thought were the
machines strengths and weaknesses.
Presented as a good choice for smaller
printers and copy shops, or for businesses that want the ability to do
their own business cards fast, the BCS210 is a business card slitter
meant to work with the ten-up layout. In the following review, we will
take a look at the BCS210 and give you what we thought were the
machines strengths and weaknesses.
Strengths:
We
think that the BCS210 would be a great choice for on demand
applications, as it can produce up to one thousand business cards in as
little as four minutes.
We were pleased to find that the
blades that the BCS210 uses are semi-self sharpeners. This means that
under normal use, the blades should last for years before they ever
need to be replaced. If, however you find that you do damage a blade or
wear it out over time, replacements are available.
The
BCS210 is perfect for users who possess a high-quality, color printer
and/or copier, so they can print short runs of business cards on
demand. With the proper design software, you can create your own
business card from scratch or using a template, print them up, and put
them in the BCS210 to create perfectly-sized cards.
We found
that with a little bit of effort, we could create six business cards
that are designed with a full bleed at a time. In order to accomplish
this we needed to overprint each card, and it ended up that we were
only able to get six cards out of a sheet instead of ten (because of
the bleed). Though it's a bit of a process, this is some great
flexibility to have and would make the BCS210 a great choice if you use
standard business cards primarily, but need a short run of full bleed
cards every now and then.
For all its capabilities, the
BCS210 is a small office machine that won't take up a lot of space.
This is great if you don't have a lot of room in your office to spare
and are wary of adding another machine to the mix.
Weaknesses:
While
the BCS210 does give you adjustable paper guides allowing you to adjust
how your sheets are fed, it is really only meant to cut business cards
that are in the ten-up format. Unfortunately, this will mean that you
won't be able to use the BCS210 to cut card sizes that are smaller or
larger than the standard two by three and a half inches. That will get
you by for the vast majority of jobs, though.
Unlike some of
the other machines out there, you will not be able to score or
perforate your documents on the BCS210. If you think you will need that
sort of capability, you will need to look into purchasing a machine
such as the Intimus BCS410 which offers a business card slitter with an
extra slot for scoring and perforating.
We found that this
machine did a great job with heavy card stocks and when working with
coated sheets. We did, however have a little difficulty getting it to
effectively work with laminated sheets. The slick surface of the
laminate caused the sheets to skew slightly as they were being fed into
the machine.
You can get higher productivity with the
BCS210's big brother, the BCS212, as the latter is designed to work
with a twelve-up layout. However, some users just prefer ten-up, and
for that, this is a great machine.
If you are interested in purchasing the Martin Yale BCS210 Tabletop 10up Business Card Slitter for your office or print facility, you should really check out MyBinding.com.
They offer a great price on this machine and they even offer Free
Shipping on all orders over $75. Plus, they carry a huge selection of
other Business Card Slitters and paper handling equipment from
manufacturers such as MBM, Martin Yale, Intimus, Formax, Challenge and
Dynafold. Check them out today!
