ProvoCraft started with an unformed block of public sentiment towards Cricut and has spent the last seven years whittling it into a tasteful single digit salute. On the other hand, Silhouette is a virtual unknown. Silhouette America was incorporated only three years ago, in Utah, as a subsidiary of Graphtec America. Silhouete existed in some form as a product family under Quickutz before then but I suspect that they sold a rebadged Graphtec machine.
Who is Graphtec? Graphtec America is a subsidiary in turn of parent Graphtec in Japan. That firm appears to be no part of the Greater Salt Lake Metropolitan Craft Mafia that controls the entire I-15 corridor from Salt Lake City to Orem. I dare not speculate publicly about the rumored Yakuza-GSLMCM tie-up that floods the US market with smuggled craft materials. Graphtec appears to be an actual successful company that has built a business that sells real products to grown-ups who use them the way they like. They have been at it since 1949. So far, so good.
The Silhouette Cameo machine appears to be derived from Graphtec's earlier CraftROBO machine, itself derived spiritually from Graphtec's main line of industrial cutting machines. The Silhouette Cameo is clearly a response to ProvoCraft's Cricut. It represents a measured response. The main innovation in the Silhouette is a bundled application, Silhouette Studio, that lets new users start cutting quickly. That application knows how to take your credit card number and generate a series of nearly painless little charges for the same kinds of unimpressive little shapes that Cricut forces you to buy bundled together on an expensive cartridge.
If Cricut is your evil cable company, then Silhouette is the mythical a la carte cable that many seem to want. I don't want either of those things. I just want to cut the same kind of simple SVG file that nearly any web browser can show. Silhouette Studio can't do that unless you introduce it to your friend Ulysses S. Grant. With that dirty transaction out of the way, Studio is happy to open as many as perhaps three quarters of the SVG files you have lying around. Three quarters is not a bad ratio for SVG interoperability in my experience.
I get my files from openclipart.org. I can't say enough about what a great resource that site is. It serves public domain vector art exclusively. They have a simple service to rasterize the images on their server for casual users who lack a tool chain for that. It's absolutely the thing for Free software.
Once you click the buttons for cut, load media in the cutter, and adjust the knife depth to match the on-screen prompts, things happen pretty quickly. I haven't yet has a serious feed or cut problem. The basic operation is the same as the Cricut machines or the HP 7475. The head moves in one direction across the piece and a pair of rollers move the work back and forth. For knife cutting on paper, the work is fixed temporarily to a sticky mat that holds all the newly freed pieces in place. This mat is not necessary when drawing or when cutting some stocks that are themselves fixed to an adhesive back.
The Silhouette Cameo offers one big hardware advantage over the Cricut mini. The Cameo includes a small image sensor next to the cut head. This sensor can locate registration marks on a printout and align cuts precisely with matching images printed on the sheet. This seems to work well when it works but I have found it to be finicky. It may be very sensitive to print quality and ink bleed in the paper. I intend to try some of the more troublesome papers in a color laser printer to see if this helps.
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| A triceratops cut by the Silhouette Cameo (pictured with Sparky for scale) Photo courtesy your correspondent |
I haven't yet tried the cutter with Inkscape or other tools. Look for an extended review once I get that working. What I have is a device that seems reasonable enough to be worth the effort of figuring out. The Silhouette Cameo isn't going back anytime soon. I was able to use it to cut decorations for a child's birthday party. They looked good and made my eldest happy. What more can I say?
No image? Perhaps a decoration from a birthday party? Or an amigurumi-inspired cutting?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. The post has been revised to include a sample cutting from the Cameo.
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