The Fellowes AutoMax 200C Auto Feed Shredder ($549.99) is a powerful and versatile shredder. It's speedy and can automatically chew through a stack of 200 sheets in a single sitting. It's a bit pricey for a shredder designed for a single user, but it's a worthwhile investment.

The AutoMax 200C, a black shredder that sits on casters, measures 19.9 by 13.6 by 22.8 inches (HWD), offering enough depth to fit the letter-size auto-feed tray. Paper inserted in the 9-inch-wide feed slot ends up in the 8.5-gallon pull-out bin at the bottom of the shredder. 

It's a cross-cut shredder, cutting paper into shreds much shorter than paper length. I measured them at about 0.187 by 1.6 inches, small enough to be secure for most business uses. The 200C also chews through CDs, both small and jumbo trombone paper clips, staples, envelopes filled with junk mail, and credit cards.

On the upper front edge of the shredder are three buttons: a Back arrow, a Forward arrow, and an On button for automatic shredding. On the top-left edge are four icons, for overheating, paper jam, a full bin, or an open bin. In case of a problem, the icon in question glows red until it's resolved.

For manual shredding, the 200C matched its rated speed of 10 feet per minute (fpm) in our tests. It's rated to shred for 12 minutes before it needs a 25-minute cool-down period.

The AutoMax 200C doesn't have the endurance of the Ativa Professional Plus HDPRO 2000 , our Editors' Choice shredder for small and home offices, which can shred for two hours at a time without needing to cool down, and is significantly less expensive. But the 200C can finish off a stack of 200 sheets placed in its auto-feed tray in short order—much quicker than it took the Swingline Stack-and-Shred 100X Auto Feed Shredder to chew through a stack of just 100 sheets. And it has good speed and capacity for manual-feed shredding as well. The Fellowes AutoMax 200C a good fit for use in a home office or as a personal shredder if you regularly have batches of documents to dispose of, prefer to shred them en masse, and are willing to pay for that convenience.