Aurora AU1230XA Anti-Jam 12-Sheet Crosscut Review

The Aurora 12-Sheet Crosscut Paper Shredder suits a small office or home accountant quite well. It performs great against similarly priced units; its only detractor is the lower security of its cross cut design.

Shredding Quality

This lower priced choice does pretty well, but it cannot compete with the higher caliber full office models we've tested. The Aurora 12-Sheet Crosscut offers a medium security level as the pieces post-shred could be put together more easily than a micro-cut document.

The Aurora 12-Sheet easily shreds 12-sheet loads and has no problem tacking on a lucky number 13. At 14-sheet stacks, the shredder begins to jam. After struggling to unjam and clean out the system, the shredder goes back to functioning without a hitch, as long as you don't exceed 13 pages.

As for junk mail, the Aurora 12-Sheet cuts through envelopes of all sizes with a slight decrease in speed. The size of shredded paper also has a mild variation dependent on envelope thickness. The larger the shredded pieces, the less secure they are.

The general robustness and level of reliability that the Aurora 12-Sheet offers are expectedly average. It clearly struggles with shredding credit cards, made painfully obvious by the noise it makes while attempting to shred them. The output is somewhat varied from mangled but not shredded to cleanly shredded cards, so it is best to check to make sure your card has been efficiently shredded before emptying your basket.

Speed

The Aurora 12-Sheet falls slightly behind our top performers, but we are super impressed with its ability to keep up.

It happily chews through one sheet in just four seconds. It smoothly sails through 20 sheets in 19 seconds with a stack of 12, followed by a stack of eight. Finally, the Aurora comes in hot with a whopping 171 sheets per minute. This outperforms other shredders in the same price range and will definitely make tax season a little less painful.

Ease of Use

The Aurora 12-Sheet performs very well here, with the exception of emptying the paper bin. The user interface is intuitive and uncomplicated. Using the clearly labeled slider to turn the shredder on, reverse jams, and turn off is straightforward.

The 5.2-gallon waste container is compact and easy to store. The plastic window on the side makes it easy to see how much longer until the bin needs emptying. The biggest drawback here is taking off the heavy lid to dump the bin. Many other models have their bins on drawer slides so the hefty shredder portion of the device does not need to be removed.

Noise

The Aurora 12-Sheet sounds pretty average with normal tasks but sounds quite strained with credit cards.

Should You Buy the Aurora AU1230XA Anti-Jam 12-Sheet Crosscut?

A smaller but still capable unit. We recommend the Aurora for the home office, but not if your profession requires the highest security. Its a pretty good value proposition, but if you can afford more then you will get better security and performance.

What Other Paper Shredder Should You Consider?

If your wallet is willing, you can get impressive security from the Amazon Basics 8-Sheet High-Security Micro-Cut for a small price jump. It is a slower machine and cannot handle as many sheets of paper at a time, but the tradeoff for greater protection from fraud is significant for some users.