Which Vinyl Cutter Is Right For Me?

CutterPros offers more vinyl cutters than nearly any other reseller in the graphics industry. We offer Boyi, Creation, Saga, Saga Precision, Teneth, GCC, Vinyl Express and Graphtec. With so many cutters to choose from it gets difficult to know which cutter to choose. Below we try to give a synopsis on which cutter may be the best for your needs.

Boyi cutters are entry level cutters and are offered at lower price points. They aren’t meant for cutting long jobs or for cutting larger volumes of work. They are stepper motor driven. One of the nice attributes of the Boyi cutters is that they have motherboards that are similar to Saga cutters. This allows for the cutters to be auto-connected to DragonCut or VinylMaster without the need for installing hardware drivers.

Creation cutters disappeared from the lineup but came back due to popular demand. These specific creation cutters, the CR series, use sandbars to drive the material. The sandbars used have a very mild grit on them. In addition, they have a vacuum which pulls down the material right around the sandbar drive rollers. Because of this design, these cutters are very good at cutting delicate materials. This is especially true for window tint and other delicate materials. From our testing, we have found these to be the best lower priced cutters for cutting window tint. The downside is that the cutters need hardware drivers to connect to the computers. The CR630 and CR1200 use an FTDI chipset with drivers supplied by FTDI. This allows them to connect to either a Mac running SignCut Pro or a PC with SignCut, VinylMaster or Flexi. They will show up as a COM port in device manager and will need to have settings set manually for proper connection with similar setting setup in the software. The CR631/CR1201 are similar to the CR630/CR1200 except that they have motherboards similar to the CR730/CR1300 so they connect they are driven by the ATMEL chipset. The ATMEL chipset will connect to the computer using a Bossa driver by default. We recommend installing the Windows 64 bit drivers that we wrote for these cutters for best performance. There is no driver for Mac for these so the CR631/CR730/CR1201/CR1300 cutters only work on PC at this time. We highly recommend VinylMaster for running the cutters. We have thousands of these cutters in the field for over 10 years and they are still cutting. They are stepper motor driven. They are very robust and are now warrantied for 5 years.

Saga standard series cutters are offered in stepper or servo motor drive systems. They all come with either a laser dot for semi-manual contour cutting or with a fully automated ARMS system. They are offered in 12”, 15”, 24”, 48” and 64” widths. They work with several sign cutting programs including DragonCut, VinylMaster, SignCut Pro, Sure Cuts  A Lot Pro, Flexi, WinPC Sign and others. They are resold under various brand names by other resellers. Saga strikes a good mix of higher quality with moderate price points. These cutters connect to Mac and PC with the standard printer drivers so no hardware drivers are needed. The servos are very fast and powerful. They have a higher force carriage than the steppers. The ARMS system and the tracking is very good making these a very popular choice. The Saga cutters use a grit roller to drive the material. As such this design is better suited to more robust materials and not thin materials such as window tint. These are also warrantied by Saga in the US for 5 years.

Available in 15”, 24”, 48” and 64”, the Saga Precision is the next generation of Saga cutters. The Saga Precision series cutters have a redesigned carriage that is more rigid. The frame is also redesigned to be more rigid. The drive rollers were repositioned relative to the deck plates for less puckering of the material when it is driven. These enhancements allow for less bow in the frame and slightly better tracking of the material. Less bow is important for larger cutter sizes such as 48” or 64” because it allows for more uniformity in cutting force over the length of travel of the cutter. This enhancement is less noticeable in the smaller cutter sizes. This also allows for a flip up top. The motors, electronics, power supply and several other internal components are shared with the standard series cutters. The redesign also results in a different industrial design with blue for the servo systems and purple for the steppers. These are also warrantied by Saga in the US for 5 years.

GCC cutters have long been an industry standard. They have similar features to the Saga cutters for many of the models offered and they have other features such as perf-cut capability for some of the higher end models. These cutters are offered for legacy customers that want to stick to the GCC cutters that they are familiar with.

Teneth vinyl cutters were add to our lineup to fill in for features that customers are demanding. Color touch screen LCD displays, WiFi and BlueTooth compatibility, illuminated cutting area and other bells and whistles are the hallmarks of Teneth cutters. They are also very good at cutting fine detail and smaller text sizes. From our experience we have found they can cut finer details than the Saga cutters.

The Vinyl Express cutters are offered as an in-between step from Saga or GCC to Graphtec. These are very good cutters offered at a really good price point and have very similar features and capabilities as the Graphtec cutters do.

Graphtec vinyl cutters are industry leading professional quality cutters. They are on-par with the other industry leaders such as Roland, Mimaki, Mutoh and Summa. We find ourselves privileged to now offer Graphtec cutters in our portfolio.

All Saga, Boyi, Teneth and Creation cutters can be traded up to Saga, Teneth, Creation, Vinyl Express, GCC or Graphtec cutters. You will find trade-in credits available on our website.