Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have an Etsy shop and one of the products I carry is gold foil prints. I purchased this laminator after I got tired of dealing with the "professional" laminator I had been using for the past 9 months, which incidentally, I also purchased from Amazon, for nearly 7 times the cost of this one. I was tired of the noise, not only from normal function of the rollers turning, but also from the squeaking, as well as the occasional "grinding" noise that would occur whenever the rollers got stuck. I was tired of having to keep the machine on for what seemed like forever to let the rollers cool down afterward. I was tired of it taking up so much precious real estate in my work area with its gigantic foot print. Not to mention the fact that getting a good, solid, gold foil print would almost always take me dozens of tries before I could get one without a lot of black spots (if you've ever tried foiling, you know what I'm talking about!). Enter the AmazonBasics Thermal Laminator, which just arrived today. I had my doubts because of the incredibly low price tag, but I was ready to try something else and couldn't wait to give this one a try. THE FOOTPRINT: The first thing I noticed is that this thing is really, really small. It has such a tiny footprint (about 13" wide by 4.5" deep), I'll definitely be able to find a permanent place for it in my workspace. HOW LOUD IS IT? The second thing I noticed is that it's SO quiet! I was worried at first that it wasn't working because all I could hear was a very quiet hum after I turned it on, but as I discovered, it works perfectly fine. THE S.L.O.W. FEED It really does feed very S.L.O.W.L.Y., as others have pointed out. Much, much more slowly than the other one I have. I'll comment more on that later. HOW DOES IT PERFORM (specifically for gold foiling): I haven't tried it yet for laminating, so I can't speak to that, but as far as the foiling goes, I put it on the 5mil setting, as recommended by others, and let it warm up for about 15 minutes. The first couple of prints came out beautifully, except for a few black spots here and there. Probably my fault, because I was relying on some tricks I had learned from my previous laminator (use sticky notes at the top of the print to hold the foil in place). The black spots occurred only over the sticky notes. So the third time, I ditched the sticky notes and tried one of the other tricks I learned, which is to fold a narrow strip of paper (about 1" in width) in half and place it over the leading edge of the print, sandwiching the print and the foil together so they feed into the laminator evenly. This time, the results were perfect. No black spots whatsoever. Not sure if I just got lucky, but I'm very optimistic, given the way the two previous prints turned out. I suspect that because the print feeds so slowly through the laminator, the toner reactive foil spends more time under the heat, and seems to adhere better to the print. It may take it longer to feed a single print through than my other laminator, but if I only have to do it once, then I've definitely saved a considerable amount of time. Also, I'm thrilled to be able to just turn it off when I'm done, instead of having to wait for it to cool down. I'm still going to have to keep my other laminator for wider prints (Amazon, please make one that will accommodate widths up to 18"!) but I am so happy I gave this one a shot. It will be the only laminator I'll use from now on for smaller gold foil prints. And if it quits working in 6 months, I can buy another one (or two, or three!) and I'm still way, way ahead on the price of the other one. Oh, and I'll come back and post an update if I discover that the perfect print I achieved was just beginner's luck.