The Silhouette Portrait Review

It has been really fun using the Silhouette Portrait.

Main Features

The Portrait only weighs 3.5 pounds so it easy to carry anywhere. The maximum cutting width is 8 inches. It’s small and compact. When you close the lid there are no visible buttons which makes for a really sleek design.

Load cutting mat: when using a cutting mat use this button to load the cutting mat into the machine

Load media: when cutting vinyl or heat transfer material use this button

Unload: when the cutting process is done use this button to remove the media material or cutting mat

Power: this button turns the the Portrait on and off

Pause: this button stops the cutting process but the Portrait does not stop as soon as you press the button. The Silhouette site best describes what happens when the pause button is pressed.

The Pause button may not immediately stop the job. The Pause button will only stop the job after it has completed the current continuous line it is working on. (i.e. If the Silhouette was cutting a series of circles, pressing the Pause button would not stop the cutting action until the Silhouette stopped cutting the circle it was working on when the button was pressed. It would then stop prior to moving over to complete further circles.)
As such, it may seem like the machine is not responding to the action of trying to pause.

The Portrait vs. The Cameo

There are 3 differences between the Portrait and the Cameo. The Cameo has a maximum cut width of 12 inches and the Portrait has 8. The Cameo has an SD card slot and a LCD display, the Portrait does not. In Silhouette Studio you can save your cut files so an SD card, then you put that SD card in the Cameo and cut things out using the LCD display instead of a computer. So if you don’t need to cut thing out without a computer, not having an SD card slot and display is no big deal. That leaves the only main difference between the Portrait and the Cameo is cutting width. Most all of the projects that I have done could be accomplished with an 8 inch cut width, except for things like the baby art project and the baby art 2.0 project.

Check out all our Silhouette projects here.

There are often Silhouette sales going on. To check if you are purchasing sale items, enter discount code MAKING at checkout for discounts to apply.