Fellowes Intellishred SB-89Ci shredder review

Cutting edge or no bite?

30 June 2008 12:00 GMT / By Stuart Miles

With the government losing documents, information and data every couple of weeks at the moment you don't want to fall into the same trap do you?

Fellowes thinks it has the solution with the Intellishred SB-89Ci, a beast of a shredder that promises to gobble up your unwanted paperwork and spit it out at the other end unreadable. But does it keep to its promise? We get shredding to find out.

Coming in a box a small child could happily make their home, the Intellishred SB-89Ci is big, has plenty of lights and enough oomph to justify the bulldog looking serious above the logo.

What you get for your money is a shredder that promises to shred between 12 to 20 sheets at a time including staples and paperclips or the odd CD thrown in for good measure.

If that wasn't enough to excite the office hound, you also get the promise that it will never jam, it won't slice and dice your fingers and hacks trying to piece your data back together will struggle due to a cross-cut size of 3.9 x 38mm.

In practice and the Fellowes performs better than suggested. We managed to shred a 20-page instruction manual with zero hassle. It is quiet, meaty enough to carve its way through anything sensible we gave it and made shredding large amounts of paper work easy. Quick, the Feds are coming, shred the black ops files!

In an effort to make sure you get the most out of your shredding time (geeky we know) Fellowes has included a traffic light indicator that lets the user know when they are nearing sheet capacity. A red light signifies the shredder has been overfed and the machine will automatically stop, letting the user remove excess paper before resuming shredding.

The idea in contrast to this is that the indicator lights can indicate when the user is under-feeding the shredder.

The Intellishred Series also detects when paper has been mis-fed or fast-fed into the shredder by turbo-powering through the job or reversing the paper out for easy removal.

Once done, the paper collection bin slides out and you'll get a pack of bags in the box so you aren't left with shredded paper everywhere when it comes to emptying it.

Try as we did to cut our fingers (the things we do for you, dear reader) the Intellishred SB-89Ci wasn't having any of it stopping every time.

As for the CD cutting capabilities, switching a cover on the top so you can line up the CD correctly and popping in a dedicated catching bucket helps to not mix plastic with paper although if you are shredding lots of CDs you'll be disappointed that you can only do one at a time.

Verdict

With identity fraud becoming more of an issue, shredding your old bank statements or utility bills is important. This, although aimed at small offices rather than a home user, is unlikely to struggle no matter what you throw at it.

Cutting edge.