Silhouette Portrait Packaging

I ordered the Silhouette Portrait bundle with Vinyl starter kit. On Amazon it looks like the Vinyl starter kit comes in a separate box, but mine only came in 1 box and I was afraid they sent me the wrong one at first.

The back of the box shows some features

These are the 50 designs it comes with. 50 designs sounds like a lot, but I think some of them are oddly specific and work best with print and cut. They should give more generic designs like "Happy Birthday" and "Merry Christmas". "Home is where you hang your heart"? I would have given designs that can show off the machine's capabilities.

The top layer is the cables and documentation.

A tube of vinyl! At last I know I got the right one. How do they know which is which, if the boxes aren't marked?

 Here's what was included:

• Silhouette Portrait machine
• DC power supply and US plug power cable
• USB cable
• 1 blade and 1 cutting mat
• 1 software CD, 1 instruction video and 1 vinyl instruction video (I think they're videos, I haven't used them)
• Starting guide
• Vinyl sheets
• Vinyl ideabook
• Hook (it's useful, but you can also use a toothpick or skewer)
• Scraper

I like how they included an actual printed guide. 2, in fact.

The inside of the machine looks like a printer. A bit more exposed.

This is where the cutting happens. It seems a bit plasticky to me, but if it can make detailed cuts, it's good enough.

I installed the Portrait immediately after waking up, so I grabbed some copy paper, chose the most complicated design they had, and used the default settings for copy paper. Result: not so good. It got much better, though.

More testing. I found out that removing little bits of paper is time consuming, but you have to clean the mat, or the machine may not cut properly if the paper is 2 layers thick.