The Swingline Stack-and-Shred 300X Hands Free Shredder ($1,249.99) is hands-free shredding at its most convenient. Instead of feeding the documents by hand, a user can open the lid, insert a stack of up to 300 documents, close the lid, and walk away while the shredder does all the work. You pay a lot for that convenience, and it's not particularly fast in shredding that way, but it should be money well spent for many businesses.

The 300X is large, deep, and tall, measuring 25 by 13.7 by 18.5 inches (HWD) and with a generous 11-gallon basket capacity. This shredder is geared to business use, for offices or workgroups with about five to 10 people. On top is a manual-feed slot for small paper jobs. Opening the lid lets you put paper in the auto-feed tray, or shred a plastic card or CD. Once you've inserted a CD, you just close the shredder's lid, which greatly muffles this normally very noisy process.

View All 5 Photos in Gallery

Controls on the front of the shredder include physical buttons for On, Forward, and Reverse, and keys for the numbers 1 through 4 for entering a passcode to open or lock the lid, a neat security feature when you're shredding a stack of sensitive documents. It's a cross-cut shredder, cutting documents into narrow strips much shorter than the length of a sheet of paper. Individual shreds measured about 1.3 by 0.14 inches, small enough to be secure for nearly all business uses.

The top slot is rated to fit up to eight sheets at once. In my testing, it could fit 10 sheets, but jammed when I upped it to 12. In feeding single sheets through the top slot, one at a time, it tested at an average speed of 11 feet per minute (fpm). It chewed through a stack of 50 sheets that I placed in the auto-feed tray in 1 minute, 38 seconds, and took 12 minutes to shred 300 sheets from the tray.

There are faster shredders than the 300X, such as the Staples 16-Sheet High-Speed Cross-Cut Shredder, which can shred a feeder full of documents at 14.7 fpm, a 235-sheets-per-minute clip. You have to feed the Staples shredder by hand, however, while with the 300X you can just put the documents in the auto-feed tray, close the lid and let the shredder do all the work. The Staples shredder can run for just 8 minutes straight, after which it requires a 40-minute cooling-down period, while the Swingline can run continuously without needing a break. What you lose in speed with the 300X, you make up for in convenience.

The Editors' Choice Ativa Professional Plus HDPro 2000, built for small or home offices, lacks the 300X's auto-feeder and ability to shred continuously, but it can chew through more paper and has a good run time of up to two hours. The Swingline Stack-and-Shred 300X Hands Free Shredder, designed for larger workgroups, costs a lot more than the Ativa HDPro 2000 and similar small-office shredders. A big advantage that a business gets for that money is totally hassle-free shredding. Just put a couple of hundred pages into the feeder, close the lid, and the 300X will shred them, and nobody has to stand around feeding it smaller stacks by hand. Such automated shredding frees up employees, adding to a department's productivity.