Cricut Explore Air 2 - A DIY Cutting Machine for all Crafts, Create Customized Cards, Home Decor & More, Bluetooth Connectivity, Compatible with iOS, Android, Windows & Mac, Mint

So far, so good

Cricut used to be the creme de la creme for makers, artists, and crafters, but theyve seriously lost their way. This is a great device overall, but the software that comes with it is absolute garbage in every possible way, and in a few weeks Cricut will be demanding you pay $10 a month for Access which is their paid subscription product in order to continue to use your own designs or be capped at 20 total uploads per month. This is unacceptable, and while the hardware is fantastic, the software, which has been hot garbage for years, is now a paid subscription that all but the lightest of occasional users will have to buy into to keep using their device. There is no local option; everything goes through their servers and now youre going to be charged to use them. I cant complain about the hardware, but considering how often I have to upload, then re-upload, then re-upload just to get something right with this clod of an app, its disheartening to know Ill have to pay $10 a month to keep going. The only thing they have going for them is that the competition is terrible (Sorry Silhouette, your app is garbage and your hardware is pathetic) but I am not a happy camper. If they go back on this subscription service, or give me a local storage option, Ill happily up my rating because I am, overall, very happy with my purchase, but as of today? It was hard to not go down to 1 star. Cricut needs to fix this because great hardware hobbled by terrible software is not great hardware.

I have been using my cricut non stop since I got it on prime day! The air explore 2 is perfect for every project you need! I have made fun signs, Christmas decor, a photo album & even iron on projects! Worth the money to be able to make custom gifts and projects

very nice to work with

This made life crafting so much easier love it!!!!

Bought this for my partner as a gift, and have gotten way more than my moneys worth! Definitely would suggest for any crafter.

I have always wanted a cricuit and finally bought myself one for my birthday. I was nervous that it would be hard to learn, but it was not, and I have been having so much fun making decals. I am looking forward to learning to make more things. It really has limitless possibilities.

So far, I think this is an okay product, You have to use their software online. It also downloads something to your computer that runs on startup which connects to the online program. I dont like programs that run on startup or that connect to an outside company. Can you say potential for hacking? It also slows down my computer when I start it. So minus one star for this. My computer is running Windows 8 and did not automatically load the drivers for the cutter. The website does tell you how to do it, however, I can see this will be a problem for the technically challenged because it requires you to access the device manager and browse for the driver. The software is fairly easy to use. I just uploaded some images, printed and cut them. They were mostly clean images that I cleaned up in another program, but cleaning the image on Cricut seems easy as well. It lets you print on your printer then cut. I dont like that there is a lot of wasted space on my paper. I dont know if I can change the margins on this, but for a cutter that will cut on 12x12 paper, it should not only cut a 9x6 area on my 8.5x11 cardstock. It does need to print a black frame around the cut area to allow the cutter to find the right lines. My printer will print with .2 inch margins or less. The first thing I cut was on 110 lb cardstock from Neenah paper. It doesnt feel heavy as light chipboard. It cut great with the regular cutter. I bought the tool set and found the spatula is useless on the cardstock, it just rips it. My fingernails worked better. The standard sticky mat holds very well, at least when new. So anything lighter may be hard to remove. I would recommend the lighter grip mat for anything thinner than cardstock. I will update as I try other papers. I bought this and 4 days later they dropped the price by $13. This really annoys me and lowers the rating by a star. Amazon no longer matches the price for products it sells. This was not sold by a third party, which I could understand, since Amazon would not have control over the deal There should be a time limit on these things, since it wasnt a sale price, just a dropped price. I totally get not matching lightening deals.

The cuts are accurate. Set up isnt too bad but the design space isnt very intuitive and you have to do a lot of searching to find the right tutorial for print and cut projects. So disappointed that it only works on white background. Was going to use this to make dust covers for my candles but my card stock is ivory and it wont read the margins on IVORY! I mean Seriously! I would have gotten an explorer 3 if Id known. DAMNN!

The Cricut Explorer Air 2 is an excellent piece of hardware for the money. The extra speed of the Air 2 vs the original Explorer doesnt seem to come with a compromise to the quality of the cut. The machines biggest flaw Ive run into is the software. When you are still new to the Cricut or new to crafting in general the Cricut seems like a dream come true. Once youve gotten very skilled with using the machine the software is a hurdle. Design Space is a joke. Because they didnt want to invest in software instead of the web control site they built instead, even with 16GB of DDR4 memory the design space software hits the browsers RAM limit and crashes all the time, losing all your work. It does not have an auto-save feature to help with this either. Uploading: Design space makes importing images a chore, being over simplified there are not enough tools and options to completely process a single image into different pieces for layers. Also if you dont do it all during upload, getting it done within design space will add on 3x the effort to just get a clean image you can work with. If you have a graphic that will need to be disassembled into pieces for assembly in design space, you have to upload the image multiple times and manually pull out all the details from each piece, saving them as separate uploads and then inserting them into a single project. Design Space: -Once youve gotten past the upload issues, youre in a design space window ready to create. Design space loves to eat RAM. So much so that if your design is complex, the browser will crash or lock up. If these two things dont happen, great. Lucky you. -Depending on the browser youre using the software will scale images differently on the output getting cut on the mat. So even though youve made super precise designs that all have to fit together just so...your cut is going to be in a different place on the mat that you chose, or the design is not to scale making it useless. Since there is no compensation for this in Design Space, you end up doing a lot of costly trial and error to adjust for the difference in scale. Chrome works best, IE is the worst, Safari isnt much better. -YOU CANNOT EXPORT ANYTHING. NOTHING. Everything you design belongs to Cricut and is locked into Design Space. If you want to design something in Design Space, then export that for sending to say, a t-shirt shop because you initially were going to make everyones shirts yourself, but found that it would be too large a job or inefficient on costs...too bad. Youre going to do it on the Cricut, or youre not going to do it with Cricut at all. -There are too few tools for creating free form shapes. I have been trying and trying to use whats there to make a simple shape for a vinyl side stripe for my car.. forget it. The shapes are too generic, and unlocking the L and W dimensions only lets you drag a shape out in ways that wont allow you to change an angle of a curve to make a custom shape..you can work around it with a lot, a LOT of patience and time but will have to settle for simple shapes if you dont have a pre-made vector graphic to upload. Cutting Mats: The cutting mats are really cool the way the grid more or less matches with the grid on the screen in Design Space. That said, they lose their sticky very fast for the price tag. If youre using these mats, youd better keep that clear plastic shipping cover they all come with and stick it back on after every use. I have one mat that I kept the clear sheet on it and one that I did not...the difference is night and day. Ive watched videos on how to restore the tackiness of the surface of the mat but it hasnt returned to its original tack, causing anything with a curl to peel up constantly. (like vynil from a roll..a staple of this machines worth). Youre going to need two mats minimum, one standard stick, and one light stick. (Green mat, and light blue mat). Card stock will come apart trying to use a standard stick mat, but peels off excellent on the light stick mat. Vynil on the other hand usually has a curl and needs the standard stick. Overall: This machine is still great, but the longer I use it the more I wish I had bought something that allows you to create things that dont have a Cricut logo on them. This machine is entirely focused on getting you into the Cricut ecosystem, having you subscribe to Cricut Access, and pushing you into buying Cricut accessories. I have not bought any cartridges, they seem like a throwback to the older machines, pre-Explorer. The cartridges seem like a waste of money, you get some of what youll actually like and use...and the rest, like an album CD from a singles artist, is junk youll likely not ever use. Everything thats in the cartridges are available al-la-carte in Design Space allowing you to buy them based on your project need individually..although the prices are stupid expensive for what they are generally. $5.00 for a single font choice. $10 for a project component. If youre not a designer, if youre not THAT serious about crafting and eating from Cricuts hand for content is fine for you, the Cricut is going to be amazing. If you are more skilled than beginner or have become skilled while using the Cricut and are getting more and more advanced, the Cricut begins to lose its luster. Ive spent hours and hours daily on this device with the Design Space software. Ive gone through learning from dozens of hours worth of online tutorials and youtube how-tos.. Ive bought hundreds in materials and have dozens of active projects, I am an avid user. Take that for what its worth, Ive beat this thing up and heres what I have found. Hopefully this helps someone else before they buy.