The Bonsaii EverShred Pro 4S30 vs the Fellowes 99ci

I purchased this to replace a Fellowes 99 shredder that stripped a gear after six years of heavy use. It's slower than the Fellowes shredder, has a narrower feed chute, will only shred ten pages at once (vs Fellows 18) and lacks the touch-sensitive safety shutoff. On the other hand, it's quieter and built like a Mac Truck. After fifteen minutes, the Fellowes was like an asthmatic sprinter...gasping for breath and needing to cool down. The Bonsaii just smiles...think Eveready Bunny with lots of very sharp knives.

For me, security is paramount. Unlike the Fellowes cross-cut strips, the Bonsaii's micro-cut shreds would be virtually impossible to reconstruct into a document. With shreds smaller than many font sizes, there's simply no clue where to even begin. CDs and DVDs are fed into a separate slot that cuts them into strips. I suppose with enough time, effort and friends at the NSA, you could reconstitute some of the data, but the effort would be substantial. The Fellowes uses the main feed slot for CDs and cross-cuts them like paper. I'm certainly not worried and I deal with HIPAA protected data all the time.

The only really annoying thing? The casters. They need to be larger and roll smoother. Other reviewers have commented on them and they're absolutely correct...they simply don't roll smoothly and that's on a hardwood floor. An expensive shredder shouldn't skimp on something like this.

After a month of use, I'm very satisfied. It does what I need it to do and does it extremely well.

Highly Recommended!

FANTASTIC SHREDDER!!!

I’m a retired engineer, and I’m really hard to please. Thus I did a lot of comparison shopping before I finally decided to buy the Bonsaii 4S30 paper shredder.

My most important requirement was that I wanted to shred paper nonstop, without ever having to wait for the shredder to cool down. This is called 100% duty cycle. Although the Bonsaii 4S30 does not provide 100% duty cycle, it allows the user to shred paper continuously for up to 4 hours at a time, which is more than adequate for most people, including me.

In a nutshell, the performance of the Bonsaii 4S30 completely blew me away-- It’s ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC! And no, I don’t work for Bonsaii or Amazon…

When I first plugged in the 4S30, I initially planned to shred only a few test sheets. Instead, the shredder worked so well that I wound up shredding a completely full banker’s box (12in X 24in X 12in) containing many years of old bank statements, credit card statements and brokerage statements. That’s a lot of paper!

Bonsaiii classifies the 4S30 as a P-5 security shredder. But let me tell you, the micro cut pieces of paper are chopped so fine that they almost look like kitty litter. In other words, unless you work for the NSA (National Security Agency), you really don’t need their 5S30 shredder, which is classified as a P-6 (highest) security shredder.

Furthermore, the 4S30 can shred up to 10 sheets of paper at a time, while the 5S30 can only shred 5 sheets. So the 4S30 works much faster.

One really nice feature of the 4S30 is its auto reversing capability. Thus, if you accidentally put too many sheets of paper into the input slot, the 4S30 will not jam like most shredders. Instead, the 4S30 will automatically stop and reverse the paper feed by about an inch or so. This enables you to easily remove the paper, separate it into 2 parts, and feed it back into the input slot. Fantastic!

Of course, like most shredders, the 4S30 has manual controls to forward or reverse the paper being fed into the input slot. However, since the 4S30 has auto reversing capability, these controls will rarely be used.

Although quiet operation wasn’t my top priority, I soon discovered that, when the 4S30 is shredding paper, it’s almost silent. Unless I put my ear directly up against the unit, the only audible (soft) sound is the paper being “crunched”. In other words, the motor and the blower inside the unit are almost silent. 

In fact, I was able to shred paper while speaking on the phone without a problem. The person that I was speaking to couldn’t hear the shredder working-- and neither could I !!

This is my second paper shredder. My first one was a Crocodile Crosscut C-2000 shredder made in Germany. Since this shredder can only shred 4 sheets of paper at a time, and it doesn’t have auto reversing capability, it usually jams when I accidentally overload it with too many sheets of paper. And although the unit has a manual reversing switch, it’s still REALLY HARD to remove the jammed paper! Of course, the 4S30 completely eliminates this highly annoying problem.

When I first fed paper into the 4S30, the paper feed speed seemed to be slower than the paper feed speed of my old Crocodile shredder. However, I soon realized that the 4S30 can grind at least twice as many sheets of paper at a time, so it’s actually faster. In addition, the 4S30 is a micro cut shredder, so it grinds paper into considerably smaller pieces (2mm by 10mm, or .078in by .393in) than a cross cut shredder.

The Bonsaii 4S30 can also grind up credit cards, CDs and DVDs. It has a separate slot for this purpose, and a separate small container located inside the main paper bin, to catch the ground up plastic pieces. This small container can be easily removed, in order to empty it. If the container isn’t replaced, any ground up pieces of credit cards, CDs and DVDs will fall into the main paper bin, where they will be mixed in with the ground up paper.

If you decide to buy the Bonsaii 4S30 shredder, you won’t be disappointed!