The Standard M2 Desktop Booklet Maker: How it Rates

Booklets are a great way to share information with the world whether you're creating catalogs, marketing materials, or even creative writing anthologies. However, putting these documents together can take a lot of time, especially when you need to produce a lot of them. That's why people frequently choose to invest in machines such as the Standard M2 Desktop Booklet Maker. We recently had a chance to put the M2 to work to see what it can do and if it's worth your consideration. Here's what we found out as well as how we rated it on a scale of 1 to 10.

• The M2 can help you create booklets of varying sizes. It's compatible with paper ranging in size from 6" x 8.5" to 11" x 17". The documents you create can measure up to 8.5" x 11".

• This device has a feed tray that can hold up to 15 sheets of 20 lb. bond paper. This will allow you to put together materials that are up to 60 pages long.

• The M2 can use from 2 to 5 staple heads so all of your documents can be securely bound no matter what their dimensions are. The staple heads can be reconfigured without any special tools. The magazine can hold up to 210 staples so you won't need to replenish them constantly. Also, both regular and loop staples are compatible with this device. (Loop staples make it possible for your documents to be stored in ring binders.)

• You can also choose to fold documents and not staple them. That helps make this device very flexible.

• The M2 is extremely easy to use. It involves little more than dropping the paper in the feed tray and then pressing a button. You can potentially create more than 800 books per hour with this device.

• This is a booklet maker that's small enough to be stored on a desktop. It measures approximately 12" (height) x 19" (width) x 16" (depth). It's a bit heavy though since it weighs 90 pounds.

• The stapler heads are covered by a two-year warranty. Everything else is covered for one year.

Overall rating: 9. We were really impressed with the Standard M2 Desktop Booklet Maker and think it would be a great choice for offices, schools, print shops, and so on. It's compatible with a terrific variety of paper sizes and it's nice that your documents can contain up to 60 pages. The adjustable staple heads are a fantastic feature and it's great that they can be moved around without tools. We were also impressed by this machine's speed (800 booklets per hour is pretty impressive!) and that it's really easy to operate. It's certainly a lot easier - and faster - to use this device to produce professional-looking bookets rather than doing it by hand. The small size is also a plus and would make it a terrific choice for cramped workspaces. Overall, the M2 is one of the best booklet makers on the market, so it would be a great one to take a look at if you're into such a device.

About the Author: Jeff McRitchie is the Director of Marketing for MyBinding.com. He regularly writes articles, review and blog posts on topics related to book binding, laminating, paper shredding, and office equipment. More than 2,500 of his articles have been published in thousands of location on the Internet. If you're looking for information about paper handling equipment, his articles are a great place to start.