Paper shredders review

02.What to buy

# Discontinued.

What about the rest?

• The cross-cut FELLOWES Powershred P-45C, P55C and PS-62C all work well but you’d want to find them for a good price. OFFICE ONE VS502C scored equally well overall and is considerably cheaper.
• The PS-62C is very stable and it’s very easy to empty its slide-out bin, but some paper shreds are likely to accumulate in the compartment housing the bin. The P-45C and P55C both have a safety lock on the controls, but the P-45C is the slowest in the test to shred 100 sheets, and the P55C is relatively heavy.
• The OFFICE ONE CD Combo (cross-cut) is the only model in the test with a separate slot to destroy CDs. It doesn’t shred the disc but embeds a series of dotted lines onto its surface to make it unreadable. We found it very quick and effective at doing this.
• The REXEL V55 and HSM X5 (both cross-cut) worked well but were let down by their lower ease of use scores. The controls on the HSM are small and can be hard to use and the REXEL has a heavy head that can be difficult to remove.
• The TDE SYSTEMS SC103 (strip-cut) and XC203 (cross-cut) have similar scores but there’s a big price difference between the two. The SC103 is much cheaper but it failed one of the safety tests, which is a concern if you have small children.
• The strip-cut FELLOWES Safe Shred SC5+ and OFFICE ONE VS502SB failed one of the safety tests and were the poorest performers in the test. They leave relatively large strips of paper uncut if you don’t feed the paper into the centre of the slot. The LEDAH C-10Eco also has this problem.