Royal 85X Paper Shredder Review
A Small Shredder For Your Home

The Royal 85X paper shredder is an attractively priced option for any home office. The price varies from just over $50 USD up to $80 USD for this shredder.

It can handle more than five sheets of 20 lb letter paper at a time, and boasts a number of attractive features. A few of these features are its small size, castor wheels, window to see how much room is in the waste basket, and reverse feed option in case of jams.

This small, reliable shredder has the ability to handle credit cards and even go through the occasional staple.

Pros

Small size ideal for a home office
Inexpensive
Versatile as it shreds paper, credit cards, and CDs/DVDs
Destroys paper to an unreadable size
Basket comes out without any trouble and is easy to empty

Cons

Doesn’t shred 10 pieces of paper as advertised. Only use up to 5 pieces or it will jam
Not built for heavy duty usage so don’t exceed the recommended amount of daily shredding
Not built to handle multiple credit cards and CDs/DVDs for shredding
Not very quiet when shredding

Specifications

Confetti Cut Shredder
9 inch wide paper slot entry
18 liter waste basket
Priced between $50 to $100 USD
Auto start, stop and reverse feed option to help clear paper jams
Dimensions are 18 inches high, 13 inches wide, and 10 inches depth
Cord length of 8 feet
1 year limited warranty from the manufacturer
Castor Wheels for easy movement
Shipping weight of 21 pounds

Royal 85X Paper Shredder Performance

Be careful not to over work the Royal 85X. As a light duty paper shredder, it's engineered to handle only ten sheets at a time, and can only shred ten to twenty times a day. We strongly recommend only shredding up to five sheets at a time. It didn’t take all 10 sheets when we tested this unit. Instead, it jammed halfway, and we had to use the reverse button to pull out the rest of the sheets.

This means that if you need to shred a lot of volume every day, you should look into a higher duty shredder. Most small home offices only shred a few papers per day, so the Royal 85X should be completely adequate for these needs. We don’t recommend this for a business shredder. The reason is most often when a business shreds documents, they do it in volume like shredding an entire file of paperwork. We recommend this for home usage only.

With a 9-inch entry width, this little shredder can easily handle letter-sized documents. You'll have to cut larger paper down for your Royal 85X to shred it, though. You can set one sheet of paper in diagonally and it still will suck it in and crumple it up as it shreds. We don’t recommend you do this, but it was fun test.

When the Royal 85X is finished with your documents, they'll be confetti, no larger than .125” by 1.375.” This is definitely small enough to ensure your shredded paper will be unreadable. As it shreds, the 85X is rather loud. You can definitely tell when it is on and working.

Details

The waste bin is not very large at around an 18-liter capacity, but it comes with a see-through window that lets you see when it needs to be emptied out. The amount of paper that is in a shredder’s waste-basket is always deceiving though. We recommend you pull out the bin when it looks full and push down the waste to make extra room if you don’t want to empty this smaller sized waste-basket often.

One advantage to the Royal 85x confetti style shredder is the small confetti cut paper doesn't fill up the bin as fast. You should be able to shred much more paper before having to empty it than with strip-style shredders. Instead of emptying the wastebasket every twenty to thirty sheets, you can empty it every one hundred and fifty sheets.

Some of the shreds stick to the top of the shredder and then get dislodged when we emptied the basket. This caused a little bit of shredded paper to get on the floor.

An automatic stop and start function makes for convenient shredding, and steel gears combined with jam-free rollers mean that you can say goodbye to paper jams as long as you don’t shred more than five sheets at a time.

If you are worried about saving money, this shredder has a green light when it is on. Make sure to turn the power off when you are not shredding paper so you don’t waste electricity because of the on light.

This is small modern looking shredder. The top is silver and the bin below is black. It also is very small in size, which is excellent for a home office with limited space available. It is only 20 inches high and 13 inches wide, so it fits under desks easily. Also, The Royal 85X comes with rolling casters that let you move it easily around on the ground and store it when not in use. You can’t roll it out too far because it has an 8-foot cord. If you need to shred documents infrequently, you can keep your Royal 85X paper shredder stored until you need it, then roll it out by your desk for office purges and other shredding tasks. The casters lock, so when you don't want the shredder to move, it will stay put.

The Royal 85X Shredder Is Ideal For Use At Home

If you're looking for a good paper shredder that can handle five sheets of paper at a time and the occasional credit card, the Royal 85X paper shredder is an excellent, economical choice. It is nice for home use to get rid of junk mail and other documents you want to make sure are destroyed properly. We don’t recommend this for office use or for a small business. There are too many reports of this machine breaking down when it is used heavily.

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