Bought a Explore 5 and I'm at my wits end. Don't buy!!
Caved in and decided to purchase the Explore 5 recently. It's the first cricut I owned and needless to say the entire experience is making me regret my decision. After countless hours on tutorials, useless support and dead ends, I have no idea what else to do. I list the issue faced below. To people who are deliberating getting one, I highly discourage you to get one even to piss poor quality of hardware and software and inexistent support.
Issue 1: Inconsistent Print then Cut Performance
I had to print multiple invitation cards across plain card stock. And the cut performance between each of the card is so extremely inconsistent.
I have went through the calibration soooo many times and all the guides in the wiki and even called support who offered zero interest to help.
I printed a total of 20 plain cardstock, each with the exact same settings, exact same environment and exact same paper. Everything was exactly the same configurations and only 2 of them managed to cut successfully. How could it be my settings issue if 2 out of 20 cut successfully?
I burned through sooo many materials trying to figure this out.
Issue 2: Design Space Buggy
I'm using a Macbook Pro so often I face the issue where are I design and I press 'make', the design refuses to show up. I went through so many support who mentioned 'oh it must be your fault cos the file is corrupted', I redid everything using their native designer and SAME issue. Then support goes 'oh just reinstall the design space dur' and EXACT same issue!! So many hours burned redesigning on so knah platforms and I'm convinced the software is the problem..
The store I bought it from couldn't offer a refund because it's already been opened and used, and Cricut refused to accept that it's their issue and just directed to their troubleshooting guides. They refuse to offer and exchange and refund, basically saying it's not their problem.
I attached links to many other people facing the exact same issue with both the Explore 5 hardware and design space to support but not like they care.