Pros & Cons
-
- Shreds CDs, paper clips, staples, and credit cards, as well as paper.
- Touch-screen controls.
- Safety features.
- Simple to use.
- Matched its rated speed in our testing.
-
- Filling to its rated sheet capacity generates overload warning.
- Not quite as jam-proof as promised.
The Fellowes Powershred 73Ci shredder ($199.99) is a good fit for personal or home-office use, or light duty in a tiny office. It's simple to use, shreds items other than paper, and performed mostly as billed. It also has a nice safety feature to protect curious hands or paws.
The 73Ci ($274.90 at Amazon) measures 19.4 by 15.5 by 10.4 inches (HWD) and stands on four casters. Paper inserted in the 9-inch-wide top-feed slot ends up in the 6-gallon pull-out bin. A four-inch touch screen below the slot features three prominent buttons—Start, Forward, and Reverse. Other controls and indicators appear as needed, such as a stack of lights to the right. While you insert paper in the feed slot, the top lights show as yellow. Once filled, the top light becomes green. Should you over-fill, the light goes red.
Like most shredders, once you insert the paper far enough into the feed slot to a certain depth, the shredder grabs it and pulls it in. The shredder stopped automatically when my hand touched the feed slot, a great safety feature if you have small children or curious pets. It matched its rated speed of 10 feet per minute. It's rated to shred for 10 minutes before it needs a 20-minute cool-down period.
It's a cross-cut shredder, cutting paper into narrow shreds much shorter than the length of a sheet of paper. I measured individual shreds at about 0.125 by 2.3 inches, which is small enough to destroy sensitive documents. If you need more security, there are shredders that create finer confetti. The 73Ci also chewed through CDs, jumbo paper clips (the larger "trombone" paper clips), and staples. It shreds credit cards as well. Its noise level is about average for a shredder, which is still noisy enough (especially when scanning CDs) that you'll want to place it away from noise-sensitive people.
Fellowes touts the 73Ci as 100-percent jam-proof, but that wasn't quite true in my testing. It's rated to shred up to 12 (20-pound, letter-size) sheets at a time, but I found that it usually accepted no more than 10, and sometimes as few as nine, before the red warning came on, and it wouldn't automatically shred. However, the Forward and Reverse buttons still worked. Though it would usually shred 12 sheets with a little coaxing, a couple of times it jammed. If you want the 73Ci to remain jam-free, you'd best heed the red warning light.
The Fellowes Powershred 73Ci is a nice step up from typical household shredders in its mix of speed, bin capacity, and ability to shred objects other than paper, and can be used for light-duty office use. For $79 more, you could get a shredder like the Editors' Choice Ativa Professional Plus HDPro 2000 ($279.99 at Office Depot® & OfficeMax®) , which can chew through more than 20 sheets at once and shred for up to two hours before needing a cool-down period. But the 73Ci offers more than enough for many home offices and tiny businesses.