Lindsay Marchand, Senior editor

I'm the senior editor here, which in practice means I'm the one who asks what you're going to make before anything else. Names on cutting boards, logos on tumblers and tags on steel are three different machines, and no amount of watts fixes buying the wrong one.

Most of my day is spec sheets, manuals and owner reviews open side by side. When a listing shouts 80W in the title, I go looking for the optical output, and it's usually a fraction of that. When owners keep describing the same thing (a bed smaller than the box suggests, a lid that won't close over a rotary, software that won't talk to the machine), I write it down and it ends up in the ranking notes.

I write the guides on choosing a machine, on diode vs CO2 vs fiber and on rotary attachments, and I edit most of the others. When a price moves or a model gets replaced, I'm the one who reopens the list and checks whether the order still holds.

We don't run these machines ourselves, and I'd rather say so plainly than dress it up. We read, we compare, and we keep the lists current.