Side by Side Comparison of: Brother vs Brother Sewing

So glad I bought this. The best thing ever it can do so much and is easy to use.

ABSOLUTELY LOVE this item!!! Although I own a Cricut, this little baby has carved out a niche of its own! I love that I can scan my whole page and then position my item EXCACTLY where I want on the page. I also like that I can adjust the size, add, subtract items. My grandson loves playing with it also.

I just love this machine. I always say if I can find an easier way to do something that's what I will do. This has made my life so much easier. I made a beautiful banner for my nieces graduation and numerous cards and home dec stuff. See it Scan it and Cut it. It is really that simple.

The only issue that I have with the machine is that the blades don't last long, and the mats loose the stickiness fast. I really do use the machine a lot though. I had to purchase a new blade after only two weeks. I am hoping that this was just a fluke.

This is an awesome machine! I use it almost everyday for different projects. I have recommended it to several people and would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone. So much better than the machine you have to use cartridges with!

I love this machine, it is my first cutting machine other than the die cutters and I am so happy with my purchase. Have not explored all it can do yet, but it does what I mainly got it for and that is to cut out my stamped images instead of fussing cutting them out. What a relief to my old hands. LOL It is long but not big and fits nicely in my craft area.Yes, it is a bit expensive but it actually does a lot of things I just have not gotten that far into it yet. I can now cut out my digital stamps with ease and not have to worry. LOVE IT>

This machine cuts amazingly well in a no time. I struggled with certain images as the machine did not recognized them to cut. I ended up having to cut several images by hand because no matter how many times I scanned it, the machine wouldn't recognize it. Unless you are doing major arts and crafts projects, I would skip this expensive purchase.

This is a great product that does what it says. It is very reliable and easy to use. The only reason I didn't give it a five, is because the scan can't pick up light colors such as beige and yellow. But there are tons of workarounds on YouTube.

I haven't gotten to use all the features yet. I'm having trouble cutting fabric, but I imagine that It's something that I'm doing wrong, will have to get into the instructions more, and maybe go to a retailer and ask for a demo. I am liking the scaning feature and paper cutting.

I really really love this product! The only reason I am not giving it 5 stars is because the mat runs out of stickiness and needs to be replaced to often!I love all the features of scanning, resizing, saving cutting and drawing it has so much to offer.The customer service has been great too!Anyone who has bought this and needs help with something should just call customer service and they will help you resolve your issues/problems.

So far has done everything I have wanted to do but.................just discovered that will only work with certain USB flash drives (chart found online at Brother site) Many USB flash drives are not compatable with this machine. Since I have several different brands most won't work with this machine. Wish I would have known this before purchasing. Most listed I have not been able to find locally. Otherwise really enjoy using this machine.

I am an avid crafter and I own a variety of other digital and manual cutting machines. I enjoy them all in one way or another. What intrigued me about the ScanNcut was the ability to fussy cut my rubber and clear stamps quickly and easily. All I have to do is stamp my image on cardstock run it through the machine, highlight the cut area on the onscreen display and decide whether I want it to cut with margins or not. Quick and easy and the machine cuts so well. I am very impressed.It cuts thicker paper nicely (unlike my Cameo) and it does small detailed cuts really well (which my Cricut cannot always do).I have tested this machine with stamps.Fussy cutting elements from pattern paper.I have cut chipboard and bazzill.I have welded letters onscreen to form words.I have scanned in shapes I have found on the internet to make cut files.I have made cut files from my own handwritten designs.It has done well at every job. I wish the screen were a bit bigger, and I wouldn't mind a stickier mat (though using painter's tape to hold the edges of paper works really well), but all in all and I am thrilled with this machine and I love not having to turn on my computer to use it. I give it 4.5 stars.

Bought the machine but have to return it within 3 days as I found out that it cannot cut partial (perforated) lines. This is an unacceptable limitation for our application.Besides; the machine is nice and instructions are good. Relatively easy to set-up. However, the carrying paper wears off quickly. It would have been nice if a light glue stick would have been enclosed.General quality is very good and Brother usually delivers. I wish they would have stated the cutting limitation as mentioned above up front though...

Eh, was excited to start making my own car decals but this cutter rips vinyl to shreds and the mats you need to use to cut things out don't last long and aren't cheap. Scanner sucks, it's low res and doesn't scan clear detailed images. Great for basic stuff but not intricate designs.

There's a learning curve. Mats could be A LOT BETTER!

Pros: This machine is a life-changer. It lets me do thing I never could before. It's hard for me to overstate how much stuff I can make with this. It's also very clear Brother has a very good engineering team. The device is well designed.Cons: This machine is designed to get money out of you, and as an anti-maker. A lot of work went into crippling the machine to make it less usable in order to extract money from users:1. Files are in a Brother-proprietary format. Brother has terms in the Terms of Service which mean that they effectively own anything you create with the Scanncut. They control your files. They sit on Brother's servers. You're not allowed to reverse-engineer them or try to get data out in any way. This is of questionable legality. That's not the contract I entered into with Brother when I bough the device, so it's questionable that the provisions in the ToS are legally enforceable (you're not allowed to change contracts part-way in once both parties agree), but it's probably not worth a lawsuit. When I bough the machine, they certainly did not advertise that it would be more like a lease where I give up control of my files. Indeed, they widely advertise things like SVG support, which worked when I first bough the machine, but doesn't work anymore (my files from a few months back no longer work with their web service). The downside? No internet? No Scanncut. Brother changes their web site? Your files break (this has happened -- they started auto-realigning SVGs, so my files which had aligned plots and cuts no longer work). If Brother ever discontinues the Scanncut, you're SoL. Without their web site, it's almost a brick.2. The cutting mats are designed to suck $$$ from you. They're intentionally thin, soft, and easy-to-cut-through. Upside? Brother sells lots of mats. Downsides? An incredible amount of futzing adjusting cutting pressure, speed, etc. to minimize damage. Even so, the machine won't cut through many materials I have no problem with on my cheap Fiskar's cutting mat. Variable thickness fabrics like corduroys or textured velvet or similar simply won't cut -- if you set the pressure to where it will cut the fabric, it will also cut the mat.3. Even the fabric support sheets are designed to suck $$$ from you. A thin piece of plastic with tacky spray are $5 each. These ought to be $0.50, and disposable with each cut. The Scanncut will cut through them, and it's easy to get fabric fuzz on them. You're either our $5 per cut, or you do an incredible amount of work to maintain them, with cleaning, etc. If you do that, by the time you remove them, they're in a million little pieces, which you're scraping off of the support sheet. Pain in the butt.This would be a brilliant, 5-star product if Brother were to provide open file formats, open APIs, etc. A huge maker ecosystem would evolve around this. I can do things in a few minutes which used to take hours. I can design things on my computer such as camera cases which hold their shape by slightly changing dimensions of layers of fabric, board games, etc. All of these take literally minutes to cut and glue or sew. The idea of combining this with a scanner is brilliant, but crippled by lack of openness. I can't, for example, have it automatically align to fabric. Once I take something off of the mat onto my sewing machine, I'll never get an accurate, aligned cut again.

I am happy with the machine as far as cutting preexisting patters but I have not been able to get it to cut out a feather that I scanned in.

I chose this cutter for it's "stand alone" feature. I didn't want to spend more money on purchasing cartridges. I was disappointed in the "welding" of letters. To weld the letters, I had to add each one as its own word and then move them to connect them. The screen is so tiny this was too difficult to do. One can use the zoom to easily see but cannot edit in the zoom feature.I then tried to just type in a word and weld that and it wouldn't let me as there were "...some letters that couldn't be welded". An example would be an N and an I next to each other. I had an idea figured out how I was going to compensate for that but the machine obviously didn't trust me to figure that out so it wasn't even going to let me try.The adjusting of the cutting knife is a bit tricky at first. I learned that if the paper began to move, the blade was too deep or the pressure too strong. It doesn't mind if you immediately pause and correct the blade setting or the pressure setting. It was able to continue right where it was paused.I found it a bit challenging to pop out my cut image and delegated that job to my husband who picked up the paper and began to vigorously shake it and that worked so much better than my efforts at trying to carefully pull it the peaks and corners that seemed to stick a little. I now shake the paper or the cut out back and forth to help release the cut image. I would like to be able to adjust the pressure in smaller increments because "0" seemed to be a bit light and "1" was too strong.I have cut paper and card stock and have cut out a lot of letters and the carbide tip blade seems to be sharp enough yet. Replacements are $10 and a replacement tacky sheet is $20.The tacky sheet is supposed to be cleaned after each use but one must be careful not to scrape off the tacky residue. Before I spend $20 for a replacement sheet I think I'm going to try my adhesive spray that I use for my sewing machine embroidery projects. I don't know how long the sheet will last and I didn't think it held the paper as much as I thought it would but it's just supposed to hold it so it doesn't move when it's cutting.One cannot put the type into a circle without inputting each letter and trying to manipulate it on that tiny screen. I have used my publishing program on my computer and printed words in the round directly on the large cut out shapes. It takes a bit of planning but was easier and quicker than trying to manipulate print from the tiny screen on the cutter.The machine will cut out the holes of the letters (like in the letter B) if you use one of the machine's four fonts but it will not cut out the holes of the letters that are scanned in. The instructions state that but there is another feature that does cut lines inside an object but I haven't used that feature yet.Ideally I'd love to have a lazer cutter for this price but that may be a few years in the future (at least at this price). I'm not certain if I have spent too much on this machine but I wanted to be able to cut out whatever I could print out with my computer. It is limited that way but still has to be less expensive than purchasing cartridges.

Realy not good to use with fabric

I was very disappointed with this, along with others I now found out. It doesnt do what it says on the tin, After 3 weeks trying to get what I wanted from it I sold it on, at a great loss but to buy a machine that actually does what I want it to do. Please think twice before you buy this and look at all the reviews especially on the Cut and Boss forums on facebook, which are a great help.

I had a Cricut and stopped using it because of all the steps and settings to get a product. Lots of wasted (expensive) paper too. I really enjoy papercrafting and teaching my grandchildren to use their imagination towards handmade cards, gifts, etc. The ScanNCut has been on my radar for awhile, but the price was what held me back. Finally, after seeing a few tutorials on You Tube, I decided to buy it. I quickly realized that I needed more than You Tube videos to use this (though I did learn on one video that you have to press the cutting blade lever downwards to have the blade actually cut the paper LOL). It doesn't tell you that in the skimpy instruction booklet. If you want to use patterns other than those pre-loaded on the ScanNCut, the files have to be converted for the machine to read them off of a USB stick.If there is a broken, or unconnected line in a drawing, there will not be a clean, full, accurate cut. You will need to inspect all aspects of the drawing or pattern and connect the lines, and in the case of light edges you will most usually have to take a pencil and darken the lines..I do like the screen that easily allows for resizing and placement on the paper that it will be cutting. The preloaded patterns allow for a wide range of creativity, and the machine cuts beautifully on those. The ability to scan decorative paper and cut around specific designs from the paper is super nice (just use a pencil around the outside if the images are light in color. The machine may not identify them easily otherwise. I'm on the fence about keeping this. I really like some of the features, but it may not be enough to justify to myself the cost. I'll try using it for a few more days after learning how to convert those files. That will be the deciding factor.UPDATE - I am definitely sending the machine back. The mats receive a strong fail. When I have send a pattern to the cutter, the outside edges cut well, but then the blade moves in for any of the interior cuts the paper shape comes loose from the mat and gets twisted or moved. It then is just trash and wasted paper. GRRRR!! Converting any file to an FMC format (FCM? I can never keep those letters straight) is just too involved. I want to sit down and get right into the project. The demos should clearly say "You can scan and cut anything you see in a book or online". Yes, with considerable preparation and aggravation. It took me one hour and 15 minutes to find shamrocks online, print them out, scan them, save them to the ScanNCut, and then cut them out. The paper wouldn't stay put. I taped it down. Then the outside of the shamrocks cut, but the interiors wouldn't because the paper lifted as it was being cut. After all that time, I produced 6 shamrocks, cut one at a time. I wasn't able to do multiple cuts on one page for some reason, though I followed directions in that "skimpy instruction booklet". I was so frustrated!! I'm taking away one of the stars I had given this product.

The Brother ScannCut 100 DM is awesome cutting paper, card stock etc., unfortunately for me the fabric cutting doesn't perform at all. Read lots of the online tutorials and many hours of trial with mostly errors and was not at all satisfied with fabric results, I have returned my machine. The mats definitely need improving for use with fabric, loose the stick factor after one use with fabric and impossible to clean. I hope Brother works on these issues, as being a non tech person the built in patterns & scan factor are super, I would purchase again to use in my appliqué projects.

I really wanted to like this. I have an in home business and spend most of my time cutting fabric for things. I thought this would be the perfect solution for that. I was wrong. I think maybe if you were cutting paper it might work well but for fabric it is terrible. You have to buy the sticky paper and replace it almost every use. It is defiantly not worth the money.

Thought this might be great for quilting...Not so much. If you do a lot of applique it would be helpful or it might be OK for scrapbooking. Just not that useful for fabric for regular shapes used in quilting.\

Can't communicate with Brother. No help. Big mistake buying it. No local help available.

Cutter has a low resolution scanner and doesn't properly pick up shapes. Cutting depth and smoothness of cuts leaves a lot to be desired.

Almost impossible to learn how to use this complex product. I returned it due to the complex instructions.

$400 and the only thing it cuts are the images it comes with. I thought it is called SCAN n CUT, I have scanned basic shapes with the blackest of ink, and the machine picks up the picture, but when you hit OK, it greys out, and nothing cuts. I have had this since December. Just started using it, SOOO disappointed. I am not the only person having this issue either, apparently. BAD investment for me...

I wanted to use this to cut applique. Although it came with an instruction manual (so many things don't) it was hard to figure out. I tried to call the phone number provided by Brother, and was on hold for 25 minutes then gave up. I was not given the option to leave my number for a call back. Once I figured it out it was hard to use. I adjusted the settings as per instructions for light weight fabric but it would not cut the fabric until I readjusted the blade then it also cut the mat. I can do the cuttings by hand easier so I've returned the unit.

Thought this would be a great tool…turns out that whenever I hit the cut button, the sheet that feeds your paper through gets caught and rotates a little, causing the blade to make the wrong turns….Have tried all of the troubleshooting messages, called tech support and nothing helps….really wanted to use this for a number of projects. Completely disappointed.