Ziszor Handheld Paper Shredder Review

Feb 26 2008, 12:00am CST | by Shane McGlaun

If your mailbox outside your house or at the post office is anything like mine it’s probably stuffed with hoards of student loan consolidation offers and credit card offers. We have all heard that one of the top places for someone to steal your identity is from these sorts of offers. Ziszor has a product we are looking at today that aims to make identity theft harder by making your junk mail harder to use. The Ziszor handheld shredder is what we are looking at today. Read on for all the details.

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Features & Specifications
Most of us are familiar with shredders used in offices to destroy sensitive documents that are of no use, but can’t simply be thrown away. The Ziszor handheld shredder is a small handheld version of these large shredders. It has 28 hardened steel cutting blades and can shred up to five layers of paper at a time.

The compact size of the Ziszor handheld shredder is designed so it can be taken with you on the road for shredding on business trips and you can carry it around the home for shredding documents when needed. The device is powered by four AA batteries that are included. Plastic bags are included to catch the shreds and reduce the mess.

Setup & Use
There is really no set up before you use the Ziszor handheld shredder other than putting in the batteries. Once installed you use the switch on the handle of the shredder to control the forward and backwards motion of paper in the shredder. I found that many envelopes with credit card offers that I receive are too thick to shred without opening them up.

The shredder is sized for envelopes and folded paper. You will need to fold up full size sheets of paper to get them to fit in the shredder slot. I don’t really see most people using the shredder bags that ship with the shredder. They don’t hold much and while they can be reused after the three that come with the device are done most will use a grocery bag or simply shred over the trash can.

If you have ever looked closely at shredders at the store there are two types. The first is the type that cuts the paper put into it into long strips. The other style is the confetti cut that cuts pages into gobs of small pieces. The reason for the confetti cut is so people can’t simply put the long shreds back together.

The Ziszor handheld shredder uses the simpler strip cut design, which is odd to me. The first thing I noticed when I shredded a credit card application is that the page came out of the shredder perfectly aligned and I could read the information on it as easily as I could before the shredding. You would hope that if a credit card company received the application back and it was taped together they wouldn’t accept it, but you never know.

However, if you are shredding documents with personal information written on them like your social security number or banking information this shredder is definitely not ideal. The information is fairly easy to obtain even after shredding with the Ziszor handheld shredder because of the strip cut. If you are eyeing this shredder for use with sensitive information you will want to look elsewhere.

Verdict

Conclusion

Pros

Small and portable
Easy to use
Cordless

Cons

No confetti cut shreds

Verdict
In the end this shredder may work decently for personal use but for anything with visible personal information you don’t want seen, the Ziszor handheld shredder isn’t ideal. The shreds are easy enough to piece back together and the long strips leave a surprising amount of verbiage visible to anyone willing to look.

7.0

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Shane McGlaun
Leading our review center, Shane knows technology inside out. His extensive experience in testing computer hardware and consumer electronics enable him to effectively qualify new products and trends. If you want us review your product, please contact Shane.
Shane can be contacted directly at shane@i4u.com.