Why buying a 3D printer sucks
thre3d.com
thre3d.com
For anyone remotely "Maker"ish, I recommend buying a RepRap rep-strap kit like the MakerFarm Prusa i3 kit and building the kit themselves:
http://www.makerfarm.com/index.php/prusa-8-i3v-kit-v-slot-ex...
The results are as good as any of the affordable FDM retail machines costing up to $3000 and having pieced it together you're better equipped to deal with the situation when your first stepper motor dies or your heated bed needs levelling or your extruder has a massive jam. The Printrbot (kit or assembled) is good too, but being PLA-limited kinda sucks in the long run.
If you really don't want to build a kit, I'd recommend LulzBot, great company.
I think there's universal agreement in the community that the best way to understand your 3D printer, and therefore calibrate it the best and get the best prints, is by building your own. That's definitely the way to go, especially if you have kids.
The 3d printer industry needs something like the wrt54g -- hackable for enthusiasts, and "just works" for mom and dad.
> For about ten years, from roughly the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, the small but rapidly growing market for synthesizers was dominated by tiny U.S. start-ups, most notably Moog and ARP (a Massachusetts-based firm best remembered as the maker of the synthesizer used to communicate with the aliens in the movie /Close Encounters of the Third Kind/). People were going apeshit over these funny electronic sounds," Moog recalled.
> "I heard Walter Carlos doing /Switched-On Bach/," rock keyboardist Keith Emerson said, "and on the cover of the album was this thing that looked like a telephone exchange."[11] Fascinated, Emerson made enquiries, and managed to borrow a Moog synthesizer for a live rendition of the theme music from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
> The extraordinary noises the synthesizer made baffled the audience to such an extent that Emerson decided he had to have a Moog synthesizer of his own to play on stage. So the rock star called the inventor and told him what he wanted to do. Moog replied that he would not recommend it—his synthesizers were only meant to be audio equipment.
Nonetheless, Emerson insisted, eventually shelling out £30,000—a princely sum—for a massive, modular system. He was very proud of his new acquisition. "Trouble was it arrived with no instruction book—three oscillators, a reverb unit, trigger controls, filters, mixers, and a load of strange wires and plugs, and I couldn't even switch the damn thing on. You needed to be a rocket scientist."
> Such problems were typical of products made by early U.S. synthesiszer firms, all of which suffered from bad management and chronic underfinancing. "We were always in the red," Moog lamented, "we had no capital. None. Zero." They would stumble along from one National Association of Music Manufacturers show (where instrument dealers gather to place orders) to the next. If you didn't have a hit at one year's show, then you had better have one at the next, or you were dead."
> A second problem was quality. According to Moog, "In the late sixties and early seventies, you could put five pounds of shit in a box, and if it made a sound you could sell it." In addition to poor manufacturing, another recurrent vexation was the inherently unstable nature of these early, analog synthesizers.
> The oscillators that generated the sound were controlled by electrical voltages. To boost an oscillator's pitch up an octave took a corresponding increase in voltage. The trouble was that the damn things wouldn't stay in tune—their pitch was notorious for drifting. A ripple in the power supply, a change in temperature as the hall heated up or as the components themselves became warmer, almost anything was enough to set them adrift, necessitating a retune.
> "The tuning was a nightmare," Emerson recalled, "I had a frequency counter built into my system which I had to keep an eye on, plus I was playing the Hammond and two other instruments. When I look back now, I don't know how I got through it, I really don't."
> An expanding market, undercapitalized firms, poor manufacturing, and unreliable components—this was a scenario that was virtually tailor-made for the Japanese, with their deep pockets, superb production skills, and long-term commitment. Japanese firms began to make their presence felt in the synthesiser market from the mid-seventies on.
Whoops: that should say "his synthesizers were only meant to be studio equipment".
It would be even better if there was a short blurb below each graphic though, i.e.
binder jetting -> "spraying liquid binder onto a bed of powder, solidifying it into a cross-section"
electron beam direct manufacturing -> "material in wire form is melted by an electron beam"
etc
I understand the graphics are meant to communicate that but they are really hard to interpret if you don't already know what the processes are.
It is nearly impossible to compare to printers if you are looking to buy. There are "specifications" but they really don't tell you what you want to know: how good will my prints come out?
Printers tell you they have 0.Xmm vertical resolution, but even that doesn't tell you what you want to know. Some good printers have "lower resolution" than some bad printers. Then there is the matter of support material, PLA vs ABS, extruder size, calibration, print speed, etc.
I hope soon we will be able to compare 3D printers as objectively as a hard drive or cell phone.
The problem comes down to what you're using your printer for. Like you said, its often better to use a "lower resolution" printer because it's faster and more reliable.
For the question "How good will my print come out?" we've tried to answer that with a '3D Prints' picture feature that are provided by the community, so you can see what quality other people get out of a particular machine.
There's something fundamentally wrong with how the market of low cost 3d printers evolved. 3D printers are a great tool but they are often advertised as a plug and play device that can produce anything in plastic at no hassle. But (most of) the machines aren't that advanced or that complex already. there are just too many variables that will go wrong, examples being diameter difference and composition differences on filaments, ambient temperature and humidity.
What vendors can do at the moment is keeping the hassle for the customers at a minimum by supplying well working machines or kits. But that is a measurement that is extremely hard to measure.
Besides the obvious size and build area, the main functional difference between my very modified Solidoodle 2 and my friend's Rostock Max seems to be how quickly each can produce a print. The Rostock's delta positioning and lightweight nozzle carriage give it a substantial speed edge, but those qualities aren't reflected in most reviews.
Speed vs. quality is always a tradeoff, though, so to collect this spec in a way that would compare printers you'd need a test print and some sort of specific quality standard. You'd also need to tweak each printer's slice/gcode generation settings, since some printers come with profiles tuned for speed and others for quality.
I do think that max print speed could be a good metric to put on the top pages of each 3D printer. I think you're right in that its an important metric that people like to know, even if they don't often crank it up to those speeds.
1) They're really really really heavy 2) Most companies are small and don't have distribution set up 3) Many companies can't make enough printers (they're kinda like garage operations), have huge lead-times, so they don't even want more orders from beyond their serviceable territories.