I was watching the video about making the ping pong paddle. I wonder why he fed it through a router at the end. Couldn’t the machine have rounded the edges? Or can it only cut straight through?
The X-Carve is so useful and capable it is easy to forget that for some jobs the power tools you already own can do the job just as nicely and much faster.
The X-Carve could certainly have done the round over, but it would have required a bit change and some careful calculations and any mistake would have ruined the paddle. So it just makes more sense to do it on the router.
A few months ago I was about 10 minutes into a 30 minute profile cut around the outside of a rectangular 3D carving I had just finished when I realized I could have used my miter saw and cut the carving out in about 1 minute.
Yep, a lot of it is choosing the proper tool. That’s the same reason I use my router table to add the chamfers and stuff to the outside of my projects. The X-Carve COULD do it just fine, but the router table is faster and easier for the same job.
Correct tools for the job, etc. 
I understand. With that same logic, however, they could have just used a scroll saw, band saw, or jig saw to cut out the paddle too. I’m at a small Science/engineering school and we just don’t have space for an entire woodshop. We don’t have a router table. We’re thinking of getting some multipurpose CNC machines. Do you think that x-carve would be a reasonable solution? Our students know CAD already and have used 3D printers.
The X-Carve can certainly do pretty much everything a router, jig saw and scroll saw can do. And do it very accurately, it just may not do it faster. A band saw can do things the X-Carve cannot do like cut a 1 inch thick piece of stock into two half inch pieces.