I have been printing stuff for 30 years, but it was only in the past five years that I finally spent the money for a more expensive paper cutter. They're not cheap, but they sure are good. Here's my review in case you are looking for a good paper cutter.
For small volume, super high precision, or photos, I use a Rotatrim Professional, 18 inch base. I thought about buying one of their bigger ones, but it gets more expensive and is harder to store. As it is, we store the Rotatrim standing up in the closet.
As the name implies, the Rotatrim is a rotary cutter. It has a very hard and very share razor disc (You have GOT to be careful when putting a new one on). I've cut paper and car magnets. It is so sharp that it cuts easily. There's a plastic slat that also helps to hold the paper in place.
There are only a couple of issues in using it. First, you have to line up the item along the edge, which is your reference to where it is going to cut. This means that if you have a huge border, you may need to trim it down to within a 1/2 an inch so that you can eyeball the lineup of the edge that you're trying to cut. With a little practice, it's not too bad.
The plastic screw that holds the guide (seen to the left) got dinged and broke apart. I just got a regular screw and put some duct tape on it so it wasn't so hard to turn by hand.
Cost: Adorama sells this for $250. Here's the link.
Now, turning to bulk cutting....that's a completely different kind of problem.
For a while, we were printing and manufacturing our own refrigerator calendars. (I'll try to write a blog item about that some day.) Anyway, getting paper products trimmed can be expensive. Office Depot will charge you $1 per cut (100 sheets max). There are 12 sheets to a calendar, 4 calendars to a page (so a lot of cuts on each page), and it would have cost us thousands. So, said I, if it would cost thousands, then we should just go buy a stack cutter and do it ourselves!
Note: This picture shows the stack cutter on top of the optional stand. You don't have to have the legs and stand; the top piece is the cutter. This is the 842 model stack cutter, which is their cheapest one. As I recall, I bought it for around $750.
It also has a razor sharp blade, but it is a big blade and costs over $100 to replace. (I've tried to get them sharpened locally, but haven't had good results.) It has several safety features to keep you from cutting off your fingers (which it would do if you tried to). It cuts up to 200 pages (20lb paper) at one time.
I use this exclusively for trimming our 12x18 paper to 11x17 (after it's folded, so the cut is clean and brochure is a perfect brochure). The only problem is that if you put 200 pages on it, the arm is pretty high and it takes some force to cut through that much paper. It can be sort of a workout. Reducing to 50 pages makes it a lot easier, but the reason you buy a stack cutter is to do volume.
I think I can safely estimate that we've done over 50,000 cuts with the machine, and it shows a little wear and tear and we've replaced the blade a couple of times, but this is a hard working machine.
RECOMMENDATION: You can't get a better small-scale, non-hydraulic stack cutter. It's the cheapest, best stack cutter that I know of. You can step up to their next model up (and spend almost twice as much), and you will get the ability to move the stop mechanically rather than by hand which allows super fine tuning. But I was too cheap, so I got the entry level one and I've just learned how to adjust it to get the results that I need. (I guess in this case the machine trained me rather than vice-versa.)
John Hokkanen, Encinitas Real Estate
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