8.0/ 10
- Much faster than its predecessor
- Reliable performance
- Great starting price
Cutting a collection of stickers on the Cricut Explore 4
Cricut’s big claim with the Explore 4 is speed, specifically with anything that isn’t branded Smart Materials. You will find “up to 2X faster” with a big asterisk next to it on Cricut’s website, with that asterisk indicating that the performance increase is compared to the Explore 3. To test this, I put the same quantities of paper, vinyl, sticker paper, glitter cardstock and iron-on material into an Explore 3 and an Explore 4 to test performance. In every test, the Explore 4 was clearly faster than the Explore 3, but only with the vinyl was the performance nearly at that twice-as-fast mark.
Faster is obviously better, especially if you’re using a Cricut as part of a small craft business, but the impressive thing here is the retention of quality. Cricut is able to ensure a certain level of quality at speed with its Smart Materials because it’s all manufactured by Cricut, which means the precise tolerances can be programmed in. It’s why Smart Materials can be cut to spectacular lengths without using a cutting mat and with no damage to the machine.
In all the tests I have performed with the Explore 4, I can find no evidence of quality loss between Smart Materials and third-party products. And if you invest in the longer, 24-inch cutting mats you can cut twice as much with a single set of instructions with that same level of quality.
