I am very disappointed with this Cricut Imagine machine. I was very excited about it at first and asked for it as a gift. I have spent literally months trying to get it to live up to what I was expecting but so far no luck. It is my first cricut.
Pet peeves:
1. It takes a while to run through the printer and cutting areas. If I just want to cut most of the time, because the printer cartridges are so very expensive, it's a big timewaster! It's like using dial-up when you could have high-speed internet, aggravating!!
2. The cutting mats will stick to paper a couple of cuts (or if you're very, very lucky) maybe 10 in the machine, then you can only use really thin paper, all other paper doesn't stick anymore, it moves around when the blade is trying to cut. (Yes I have tried washing the mats, and almost everything else suggested except the things that void the warranty)
3. When you have an image selected, it usually has to be sized, that's fine. But there isn't a drop down list of sizes, I have to sit there and tap the size bigger until it's the size I want, it takes a really long time as opposed to the rolling dial on older machines. I would use the fit to page (or make the page smaller but that takes just as long to program the machine), but most of the time I don't want it that big, when I'm doing a scrapbook I like the 5"-6" size.
4. When you're using a regular cricut cartridge there is no zoom button to figure out which button to pick, it's zoomed out so you can see the whole keypad. The problem is that most of the images look like little squiggles. Basically you can label your booklet (if you have an old booklet, not the newer shiny ones, it doesn't work then), or try to memorize which ones you like to use, or guess which one it is you want, do you want squiggle 1-30? Shift or no Shift? It goes on and on... Then delete all the ones you don't actually want, it's very time consuming when you just want to print one little layer!!
5. You really can only use a full 12" by 12" paper when cutting, almost any scrap you use will most often move around and not actually stick to the "sticky" mat.
The WORST problem in my book is this:
6. THERE IS NO EASY WAY OF MOVING THE IMAGE!! You can't move the image to the middle of the page, or side or anywhere but the top left. Plus since the mat isn't terribly sticky (I'm being very generous saying that) it uses up all the stick in that area, if you could move the image around you might be able to get more use out of it. (It would be so cool if you could have a "move image" button so you could resize it right in the machine instead of having to buy a gypsy...) This kind of is a money grab on Provo crafts part. They sell a machine that does half the stuff, then say here pay $$$ so that it can do everything it's capable of!!
My summary is this: I could live with the rest if it was easy to move the image on the screen of the Imagine, and the mats were sticky enough. But all put together????
Thanks for reading my Cricut Imagine rant; I don't want anyone else to be this disappointed in the sub-par machine.