Summary: Amazing with some software quirks.
I recently bought a photo printer and thought I'd buy a cutting machine so I can make stickers. Silhouette seemed to be the machine of choice as their main competitor seemed to need a subscription to use their software (!?!?!). For some reason I found this Portrait 4 going for a really good price (SGD283 with shipping) and decided to get it.
The Portrait 4 only comes with one toolhead, the AutoBlade. Mounting the autoblade is very straightforward - but it took me awhile to find out _how_ to do it. It is not explained during the machine setup, only when you actually want to cut does it pop up a menu that tells you what to do. This kinda makes sense but I was trying to mount it during setup and was a bit lost, not seeing it in the manual.
Connecting to the cutter is via bluetooth, and it went smoothly, and it also updated the firmware. I did not have to do any pairing though, so I'm wondering if its possible for someone else in range to just connect to my portrait 4 and run it randomly. Hmmm.
The cutter comes with an adhesive cutting mat, you're supposed to stick the material you want to cut on it before running through the cutter. This cutting mat's adhesive layer is covered with a piece of blue protective paper. However, nowhere in the manual did I see any instructions on how to use it! I had to look up a youtube video where a youtuber showed how to use it. In addition, we're supposed to keep the protective paper in order to cover the adhesive layer when not in use. Again, I didn't see this in the manual.
I started testing using just A4 copy paper, and it generally went smoothly after I figured out some issues. First, to get accurate cuts, the Silhouette Studio software will add some "registration marks" (I'll show some later) to the project. When I first did this, one of the corner registration marks did not print out and it kept failing.
It seems like I forgot to change the paper type to A4 and was printing at Letter size, causing the registration mark to be printed outside of the paper. Once I figured that out, the A4 paper was registered easily and cut out my tests with no issue.
The next test was with actual sticker paper, and I acquired some inkjet compatible glossy vinyl sticker material. This (surprisingly) printed out really well and cut out really well with no issues. I was very impressed.
Next, cutting out stickers that have been laminated. I applied a "broken glass" laminate and the cutter kept failing at the registration detection stage.
I was pretty sure this was the reflective surface messing up the camera or whatever they were using to pick up the registration marks - I printed out a copy of the registration marks on normal copy paper and pasted it on the laminated sheet:
Once this was done, the cuttter easily picked the marks up and proceeded to cut. However, this material is very thick, so the default settings did not cut all the way through the backing. I had to increase the depth to 6 for the cutter to cut through the backing paper.
(Note: you might notice some bad cuts on the image above, that was because I tried cutting it without putting it on the cutting mat and after some cuts it started to slide and make wrong cuts.)
More importantly, it doesn't seem to support a colour managed workflow - I've seen suggestions online that you could print the design with registrations from Silhouette Studio as a PDF, after which you can bring into your colour managed DCC software of choice and print it from there. That would work, just annoying. I'm using my printer's sRGB profile and the results match the prints from stickerapp, so perhaps just having the image to be cut have a colour profile embedded/assigned be enough?
By default, the software will autotrace imported PNG files, and these seem to work great. These autotraces are usually very close to the edge of the sticker and there is functionality to expand this edge.
There is also a manual trace function, but I can't figure out how to use it - the resulting traces tend to trace everything not just the outline, even though I've set it to outline mode.
I've taken to using just using the alpha to make a mask for the trace feature to make the cuts.
Another issue I've encountered is if the registration fails on a material that should work, it's better to just cancel the job and send it again - very often this new job's registration detection will work - the software has an retry feature after any registration fails and I've never had that work.
Also, make sure there's lots of space behind the cutter - if there's something in the way, it's very easy for the cutting mat to hit it and go out of alignment.
Overall a very fun piece of kit to have. I especially love making stickers with Broken Glass laminate, but applying the laminate is very time consuming and error prone (you need to use either a squeegee or laminator) and also the need to apply the registration marks on top. I'll have to see what other folks are doing to avoid doing this. Else printing normal glossy stickers is a very straightforward process.