Martin Yale Intimus BCS210 Business Card Slitter Review

Presented as a good choice for smaller printers and copy shops, or for businesses that want the ability to do their own business cards fast, the BCS210 is a business card slitter meant to work with the ten-up layout. In the following review, we will take a look at the BCS210 and give you what we thought were the machines strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths:

1. We think that the BCS210 would be a great choice for on demand applications, as it can produce up to one thousand business cards in as little as four minutes.
2. We were pleased to find that the blades that the BCS210 uses are semi-self sharpeners. This means that under normal use, the blades should last for years before they ever need to be replaced. If, however you find that you do damage a blade or wear it out over time, replacements are available.
3. The BCS210 is perfect for users who possess a high-quality, color printer and/or copier, so they can print short runs of business cards on demand. With the proper design software, you can create your own business card from scratch or using a template, print them up, and put them in the BCS210 to create perfectly-sized cards.
4. We found that with a little bit of effort, we could create six business cards that are designed with a full bleed at a time. In order to accomplish this we needed to overprint each card, and it ended up that we were only able to get six cards out of a sheet instead of ten (because of the bleed). Though it's a bit of a process, this is some great flexibility to have and would make the BCS210 a great choice if you use standard business cards primarily, but need a short run of full bleed cards every now and then.
5. For all its capabilities, the BCS210 is a small office machine that won't take up a lot of space. This is great if you don't have a lot of room in your office to spare and are wary of adding another machine to the mix.

Weaknesses:

1. While the BCS210 does give you adjustable paper guides allowing you to adjust how your sheets are fed, it is really only meant to cut business cards that are in the ten-up format. Unfortunately, this will mean that you won't be able to use the BCS210 to cut card sizes that are smaller or larger than the standard two by three and a half inches. That will get you by for the vast majority of jobs, though.
2. Unlike some of the other machines out there, you will not be able to score or perforate your documents on the BCS210. If you think you will need that sort of capability, you will need to look into purchasing a machine such as the Intimus BCS410 which offers a business card slitter with an extra slot for scoring and perforating.
3. We found that this machine did a great job with heavy card stocks and when working with coated sheets. We did, however have a little difficulty getting it to effectively work with laminated sheets. The slick surface of the laminate caused the sheets to skew slightly as they were being fed into the machine.
4. You can get higher productivity with the BCS210's big brother, the BCS212, as the latter is designed to work with a twelve-up layout. However, some users just prefer ten-up, and for that, this is a great machine.

If you are interested in purchasing the Martin Yale BCS210 Tabletop 10up Business Card Slitter for your office or print facility, you should really check out MyBinding.com. They offer a great price on this machine and they even offer Free Shipping on all orders over $75. Plus, they carry a huge selection of other Business Card Slitters and paper handling equipment from manufacturers such as MBM, Martin Yale, Intimus, Formax, Challenge and Dynafold. Check them out today!