Pros & Cons
The Swingline Stack-and-Shred 100X Auto Feed Shredder ($299.99) can chew through a stack of up to 100 sheets placed in its feeder. It isn't fast, but it's convenient, small, and easy to use, and it's relatively inexpensive for an auto-feed shredder.
The Swingline 100X is designed for home or office use for one or two users. Black, with rounded corners, the shredder measures 16.3 by 12 by 17.5 inches (HWD). On top is an 8.7-inch-wide manual feed slot for smaller paper jobs, which can also handle staples or small paper clips. A separate feed slot, just behind the first, fits plastic cards.
On the top front edge of the shredder are three buttons: Rev, Auto, and Fwd. Pressing a plastic latch on top of the shredder, just behind these buttons, pops open the lid to reveal the 100-sheet feeder tray. When you then press the Auto button, the 100X will start feeding from that tray as soon as the lid is closed. The paper shreds fall into a 7-gallon basket that, in our testing, held the shreds of close to 150 sheets before needing to be emptied. Emptying the bin is as simple as grabbing a handle on the front of the shredder, above the basket's small window, and pulling it out. The 100X is rated to shred continuously for 15 minutes, after which it needs a short 10 minutes to cool down.
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A cross-cut shredder, the Swingline 100X cuts documents into narrow strips, much shorter than the length of a sheet of paper. Individual shreds measured about 1.3 by 0.19 inches, small enough to be secure for most business uses.
The top slot is rated to fit up to six sheets at once. In my testing, it could manage eight sheets without jamming. In feeding single sheets through the top slot, one at a time, the shredder matched its rated speed of 7 feet per minute (fpm), taking 7 minutes 55 seconds to shred 100 sheets from its auto-feed tray. This is considerably longer than the Fellowes AutoMax 200C Auto Feed Shredder took to shred twice as many sheets (5 minutes 13 seconds). But the convenience of being able to load the 100X with paper, start the shredding, and walk away may outweigh any speed deficiency.
The Swingline Stack-and-Shred 100X Auto Feed Shredder is slow, compared with other auto-feed shredders we've ltested—the Swingline Stack-and-Shred 300X Auto Feed Shredder chewed through a stack of 300 sheets in 12 minutes. We timed the Editors' Choice Ativa Professional Plus HDPro 2000 at 8.7fpm, and the Staples 16-Sheet High-Speed Cross-Cut Shredder at a blistering 14.7fpm). But the Stack-and-Shred 100X is compact and relatively inexpensive for an auto-feed shredder, and for many will be worth the convenience of letting the shredder do its work while they get back to their own jobs.
Final Thoughts
