Cutting Plotters Explained: Vinyl, Mats, Software and Subscriptions

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A cutting plotter is a printer with a blade instead of ink. It moves a small blade along the lines of your design and cuts film, paper, card or fabric. With heat transfer vinyl it makes designs for shirts, with vinyl it makes stickers and lettering, and with card it makes cards and packaging.

What a plotter cuts

The blade only cuts as deep as necessary. With film it goes through the colour layer but not through the carrier. The design therefore stays on the carrier sheet and can be transferred as a whole. How deep and how firmly it cuts is set through material presets in the software.

Typical materials:

• Heat transfer vinyl (for ironing onto textiles), also flock, glitter and metallic film
• Vinyl for stickers, windows and lettering
• Paper and card
• Fabric and felt, with a rotary blade depending on the machine
• Thin wood, leather and foam on the more powerful machines

How much material a plotter can handle depends on the machine. According to the manufacturer, the Cricut Maker 5 cuts up to 3 mm and has 13 compatible tools, including rotary blade and Knife Blade. The Explore 5 has six tools and is meant for paper, vinyl and heat transfer vinyl. Manufacturers do not state a cutting force in their data sheets.

With or without a mat

Most materials go on a cutting mat, a carrier board with a slightly sticky surface. You can only go without a mat with material that has a firm carrier of its own:

• Cricut: matless only with Cricut Smart Materials (Smart Vinyl, Smart Iron-On, Smart Paper). With these, Maker 5 and Explore 5 cut up to 3.6 m long, and with a mat a maximum of about 30 x 60 cm.
• Silhouette Cameo 5α: material with a carrier sheet runs without a mat up to 4.87 m. Instead of an adhesive mat there is an optional electrostatic mat.

Weeding and mirroring

After cutting, you remove the excess material with a weeding hook. This is called weeding. Only your design is left on the carrier.

With heat transfer vinyl you have to mirror the design before cutting. The film lies on the mat with the shiny carrier side down when cutting, and flips over when pressed on. Siser states this explicitly for EasyWeed and StripFlock Pro. Vinyl for stickers is not mirrored.

Software and subscriptions

According to Cricut, licensed designs such as Disney are not included in Cricut Access. Silhouette additionally has a Design Store with its own subscription. The manufacturer gives the prices of the Silhouette upgrades only in US dollars.

What Design Space can do for free, what Access Standard and Premium cost and which alternatives exist is covered in Cricut software: Design Space, Access and alternatives.

Which plotter?

• Small and cheap: Cricut Joy Xtra with a 21.6 cm cutting width for cards, stickers and small heat transfer vinyl designs
• Standard for film and paper: Cricut Explore 5 or Silhouette Cameo 5α with a 30 cm width
• Also fabric, leather, thin wood: Cricut Maker 5
• Sewing and quilting: Brother ScanNCut with built-in scanner, works without a computer

Criteria, a comparison table and the question of which Cricut suits you are in the plotter buying guide. All plotters with data and prices are in the device overview. To apply heat transfer vinyl you need a heat press; how this works with a press or an iron is explained in Plotting and ironing on heat transfer vinyl. For multicolour designs and stickers see Multicolour plotting and Print then Cut, and for cutting problems Plotter does not cut properly helps.

Sources

• Cricut: Maker 5, Explore 5, Cutting without a mat, What is Cricut Access, Cricut Access prices, Terminology, Applying iron-on
• Silhouette America: Cameo 5α, Silhouette Studio
• Brother: ScanNCut SDX2250D, Note on CanvasWorkspace
• Siser: EasyWeed at Swing Design, StripFlock Pro data sheet