Header banner
Revain logoHome Page
Carol Miller photo
1 Level
9645 Review
6230 Karma

Review on πŸ”ͺ Enhance Your Craftsmanship with Silhouette America's White Cutting Machine by Carol Miller

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Big improvement, clunky software

Around the same time last year I tried Portrait 2. Nothing but misery. He chewed on my mats, never fixed the printed markings properly, and never cut the same thing twice in a row. Forward slashes kept failing or shutting down completely. I had to send it back after two days of frustration. Portrait 3 changed the rules of the game for me. The Autoknife is great, just place it on the paper to be cut and you're done. You don't even have to use a sticker sheet mat unless you cut all the paper. Now I will say that their automatic PNG tracking feature introduced in Silhouette Studio 4.4 is buggy/their software needs an overhaul. I had a PNG file saved in my Silhouette design space and the edges weren't auto-tracing at all. And copying the transparent PNG also caused the autorouting to not work. You need to SAVE the images to your computer and then drag and drop them into the software. It then automatically detects the boundaries and tracks them automatically. Once you figure that out and want to add an offset (e.g. a colored or white border to the stickers), use the offset settings as usual, then select the entire sticker/image, right click and weld. This merges the new offset edge and the original image edge into one cut. The software is pretty clunky and I wish it was handier than the Cricut software. There are many settings. But luckily, all the hard work here is done by an automatic knife. I will say that the editing accuracy between Silhouette Portrait 3 and Cricut Air 2 is day and night. I had horrible problems with the Cricut sensor, no amount of light, calibration or troubleshooting helped. The silhouette cutouts are pretty accurate! That's a relief.

Pros
  • Silhouette Portrait 3. AutoBlade. 8" x 12" cutting mat. Power cord and USB cable. Silhouette Studio software.
Cons
  • Little things