KOBRA 270 TS C4 AO

The KOBRA 270 TS C4 AO is the cross-cut member of the 270 TS touch-screen family, and the one to pick when the paperwork leaving your office contains personal data rather than routine correspondence. It cuts at 3.9 x 40 mm, which is 156 mm² per particle and therefore DIN 66399 / ISO 21964 level P-4. What separates it from the S4 and S5 strip-cut siblings on the same chassis is not just the security level: this build adds an integrated automatic oiling system, so the cutting head is lubricated without anyone remembering to do it.

Key Features

• P-4 cross cut at 3.9 x 40 mm. Roughly 2,000 particles from a single A4 sheet, which is the level most US privacy and HR retention policies point to for personal data.
• Integrated automatic oiler. The cutting head is oiled from an on-board reservoir. Dry cross-cut knives are the most common cause of falling sheet capacity, and this removes the human step.
• Separate CD/DVD cutting unit. Optical media go through a dedicated second cutting head instead of the paper knives, so discs do not blunt the P-4 head.
• Touch panel control. Forward, reverse and stop are capacitive pads rather than mechanical switches, and holding Forward for five seconds runs the machine continuously for 30 seconds for transparent film.
• 24-hour continuous duty motor. There is no timed cool-down period; the 500 W motor is rated for continuous running rather than a duty cycle.
• Carbon-hardened steel knives on a chain drive. Kobra rates the knives as unaffected by staples and paper clips, and the drive uses steel gears rather than a belt.
• Energy Smart standby. The machine drops into standby after eight seconds of inactivity and disconnects itself from the mains after four hours.
• EPC load display, auto start/stop, auto reverse and safety stop on door opening or a full bin.

Specifications

What's in the Box

The shredder head and its 29-gallon caster-mounted cabinet ship as one assembled unit, together with the power cord and the operating manual. Waste bags are not included and neither is a spare bottle of Kobra cutting-head oil; both are ordinary consumables and are worth adding to the first order so the machine is usable on day one.

Who Should Buy This — and Who Should Not

Buy it if a department of roughly ten to twenty people needs P-4 destruction of records containing names, account numbers or health information, and if nobody in that department is going to reliably oil a shredder. The automatic oiler is the reason this model exists alongside the plain 270 TS C4, and it pays for itself the first time a neglected head would otherwise have jammed.

Do not buy it for volume. At 24–26 sheets a pass on 70 g/m² paper it is slower than the strip-cut KOBRA 270 TS S5 on the identical chassis, which takes 30–32 sheets but only reaches P-2. If your retention policy tolerates strip cut, the S5 clears a purge box far faster and costs less. If you are destroying classified or Top Secret material, none of these will do — you need the KOBRA 270 TS HS-6 AO at 0.8 x 5 mm, which is on the NSA Evaluated Products List but drops to four or five sheets a pass. And if the 29-gallon bin is the constraint rather than the cut, the KOBRA 300.2 C4 gives you the same P-4 cut into a 40-gallon cabinet with a 900 W motor.