Explore 4 of Cricut is faster, cheaper, but I’m not sure I would call it better

8.0/ 10
Result

Cricut Explore 4

Pluses

• Much faster than its predecessor

• Reliable

• A great starting price

Disadvantage

• There are no new supported tools

• There are no new supported materials

Ask anyone who regularly uses Cricut what could be done to improve the experience and usually hear one answer for everyone else. This is a great machine with cool software, but it can be faster. Cricut’s Explore 3 Introduced a way to create more quickly than competition without losing quality or precision in the process. Cricut’s smart materials is huge, but expensive and does not cover the complete breadth of what these cutting machines are capable.

With the new and somewhat apparently called Cricut Explore 4The speed and accuracy that have previously been available only for intelligent materials, now exists with whatever you feed it. The best part is that this new machine is already one of the most accessible on the market.

It has always been easier to show what a Cricut cutting machine is doing than to describe it to someone in a short sentence. This is one of the sweetest qualities of this category of gadgets, restrictions are rarely based on hardware. The best places to see this are either the market of the local farmer or Etsy, where you will find smart people who have used Cricut to do everything from personalized labels for handmade candles to make decorations to be ironed to shirts and jackets. With the excellent and constantly improving Cricut design space and almost any of the cutting machines in its composition, you can do some very cool things with little or without previous experience.

Outside the box, it would be surprising if you could find out the difference between Cricut Explore 4 and the model released nearly four years ago. In addition to the new, more color of the outer plastic and the label on the cutting apparatus, the visible parts of this machine are almost identical. The good news is that the price drop did not come with a decline in the quality of the hardware – this machine still feels very healthy and cuts as smoothly as its predecessor. But if you are looking for a very new functionality or tone of new features, you will not find them here. If you own Cricut Explore 3, you more or less you already own Cricut Explore 4 in terms of what it can cut and how the software interacts with this new machine.

The big CRICUT statement with Explore 4 is a speed, more special with everything that is not branded intelligent materials. You will find “up to 2x faster” with a big asterisk next to it on the Cricut website, with this asterisk shows that the increase in performance is compared to the study 3. To test this, I put the same amounts of paper, vinyl, sticker paper, glitter cardboard and iron material in a material that examines 3 and study 4 to test. In each test, Explore 4 was obviously faster than Explore 3, but only with vinyl was productivity almost at this sign twice as much.

Faster is obviously better, especially if you use Cricut as part of a small craft business, but the impressive thing here is quality retention. Cricut is able to provide a certain level of quality at speed with its intelligent materials, as everything is made from Cricut, which means that the exact permissible deviations can be programmed. Therefore, intelligent materials can be cut into spectacular lengths without using a cutting mat and without damage to the machine.

In all the tests I have done with Explore 4, I cannot find evidence of a loss of quality between intelligent materials and third -party products. And if you invest in the longer, 24-inch cutting pads, you can cut twice as much with one set of instructions with the same level of quality.

At $ 250, Cricut New Explore 4 is available for The same price can get Explore 3 For most days. This is incredible given that the Explore 3 has been available for almost four years and has only recently started observing significant discounts during the shopping events. This makes this machine not only easy to recommend among the restricted competitive kit, but also easy to recommend as the best Cricut machine to get started with a new craft trip, or as the best way to upgrade if you have a previous generation.