Sizzix Die Cutting Machine Review

I've owned the Sizzix for more than 4 years now and own over 100 dies, plus the "tag-a-long" and many sizzlits dies.  I purchased the system when there were not a lot of other alternatives to obtain die cuts.  It does make good cuts and has some really cute dies that I use all the time with my Kindergarten Sunday School class, tags for gifts and my sons' teachers borrow some dies frequently.  It is really good if you want to cut multiples of one thing or the same things over and over. 

However the drawbacks are as stated previously.  It is VERY heavy and the dies are very heavy too and take up huge amounts of room.  There is no good storage system for them.  They are not well tagged to make it easy to find the one you are looking for in a big box of them.  Buying the machine is just the start of very high costs as the dies are expensive also and not very well designed.  On many of the dies I have the design takes up only about 50% of the die and there is room for more items to be placed on the die but they just were not. 

 Given the knowledge I have today about how much I have spent over time on the machine and dies, I could easily have invested in one of the top of the line computer cutters.   The alphabet sets are super cost prohibitive and unwieldy to store.  If I had to do it all over, I would have opted to not do the Sizzix but go for a Wishblade or something like that and probably have ended up with money left over. 

In the early days of scrapbooking the Sizzix was what there was and it does the best job it can, but technology has made it into an expensive and enormous dinosaur.   I can't recommend that any new scrappers buy this tool today.