3D Printer Shootout – $600 Printrbot vs. $20,000 UPrint SE Plus
hanselman.com
hanselman.com
Maths
(0.2mm/0.1mm)^3
What I was reminded of is commodity servers. You run the models through a cluster of three or four cheap rigs (maybe with different slicing software) to increase the odds of getting a good artifact in 8 hours and to allow taking a machine offline for tuning.
Of course eight 0.2mm resolution printers will no more create a 0.1mms artifact than 9 fertile ladies will gestate an infant in one month.
And for a consumer oriented product probably the 99.9% case since most will sit on the shelf because it's still printing and how much stuff do people download off the internet and print with their color printers these days?
The idea that we will all be making our personalized LPS (Little Plastic Shit)[1] to our snowflake's content is true. But only because most snowflakes are content without doing it as a hobby. It's Buck Rodgers cool when it's on the screen, but the reality of waiting 8 hours for maybe getting a widget only appeals to some people.
It's like raytracing silver balls above a red and yellow checkerboard. Amazing to see it come out line by line over four hours at 320x200 in 1989. Not worth setting up a Blender scene to do it in the blink of an eye today.
For most people, there are better options than doing it themselves. For a few use cases doing it yourself is the best option. And doing it yourself is a great option for people who want to do it themselves. That's the same class of people who put their recipes on floppy disks in C64 days.
Done ranting. Get off my lawn anyway.
[1] or plastic crap : https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Plastic_crap
You picked the most generous aspect for comparison but it still looks rough.
I used the racing analogy in the price comparison. It's cheap to make up a margin of minutes on the fastest car. It's really expensive to make up fractions of a second.
My internet connection to the omniscience is down. I was just going with what's described in the article.
There's a reason that the $22,000 model costs $22,000. Margin is only one of them.
And that's only the case if other features of the system don't add any value that could offset the cost of the plate and the additional day of design labor and overhead is ignored.
All of which is to propose the possibility that there might be business cases where the machine makes sense and the possibility that everyone besides we two obvious geniuses might not be incompetent.
> My 0.2mm print took about 7 hours
> Brandon said it took 8 hours and 22 minutes.
So in this case, the $22,000 printer took ~17% longer.
In order to create a "bar" .2 mm on a side, the .1mm printer needs to lay down 4 lines, while the .2 mm printer only lays down one.
You can't really call it more work either, since the resulting volume is identical.
The only thing that's different between the two prints is Z resolution, and that's a factor of 2 difference.
But what it does say, and I believe it is incontrovertible, is that the "personal 3d printer" market is evolving at least as fast as the "professional" 3d printer market and the overlap of capabilities is growing. For any manufacturing technology its going to be speed, cost, finish, and capability and while personal 3d printers have nailed it on cost, and they are now competitive on speed, they are working on finish and capability. And that suggests to me its a time thing, not a 'new science' thing between when 3D printers start delivering on their potential.
I've got a Makerbot Replicator 1/Dual (the last of the 'opensource' Makerbots and currently replicated by the Flashforge Creator 3D for half the price I paid :-) which was much better than the original Makerbot 'cupcake' or the early reprap machines. There are print heads (a combination of an extruder and a hot end) now available which both improve the finish significantly and the speed. So its really a fun place to be.
And my personal favorite is that its a way to exploit robotics hacking in a much more practical way than running around a room avoiding walls :-).
Worth nothing is that things like the Z-scar being on the side of the cup instead of under the handle is something that's decided by the slicer (the software that translates the 3d model into printer commands).
Different open source slicers that are regularly used produce different locations for these scars -- and I'm not sure if it's actually possible to position/hint this Z-scar manually in any of them. They often do try to be "smart" about it, but the end result may vary.
All in all, it will likely have come out decent, but certainly not under the handle as you have. This I guess is because Cura will start the new layer close to where it finishes it's previous layer by default. In other words: it depends on infill percent/pattern and model location on the build platform.
I figure this is because you've added support. This causes the print head to get a "closest" start of the new layer exactly under the handle (because that's where the support material are). So going as far as calling it "lucky", no. The support placement actually helps Cura put the Z-scars in a good place on this model. On another model, it might be the exact opposite.
(PS: I use Cura for all my slicing and I like it a lot -- but I don't feel like the software actually gives me much control about the Z-scar placement)
I've heard from the couple of owners that Metal ones are much better than Simple Makers. here is the quote "but Printrbot Simple Metal is very reliable, I had one I’ve been carrying around in my car unpacked (I just dump it behind the seat, same with the tablet) and I just put it on the desk and it prints. Every time. Auto-bed leveling does wonders."
And another one from the same guy
"Just to be clear, I’m talking about Printrbot Simple Metal (not the previous wood version – that one is realty bad: it de-calibrates from day to day simply because of humidity "
We were having the local college print things for us for $150/pop. For double what we paid we could have gotten a lightly used Stratasys which is the same printer the college uses.
https://www.3dhubs.com/best-3d-printer-guide is a pretty up to date guide on what the good printers are today.
Care to expand on this? I've been playing with the idea of buying a couple very nice 3D printers and starting a 3D printing company. I think a lot of people have been burned by the consumer-level printers or simply need bigger or higher quality prints. What are you guys printing? Do you feel $150 is a fair price? What is the turn around time? What materials? Does that include delivery?
My gut feeling is a local company with local delivery and quick turn-around could be more tempting that going with one of the web-based providers who take days.
Being cheaper isn't going to win you a ton of business, imho. Being faster or better or more personal, or providing unique materials may win you quite a lot of more niche business, though. For instance, for low volume injection molding, Proto Labs are hard to beat as they will do a fully automated quote and give you flow analysis for parts you upload within an hour or two (usually this takes days). Your business would need to separate itself from the other existing 3d printer providers in order to have good success.
Buying a fleet of cheap printers [one or two at a time based on demand] makes more sense because the business model is renting and there's a lot more of a market for renting a 3d printer at $5/hour than at $30/hour. More printers means more peak capacity.
Just because a new version or refinement exists, does not invalidate the usefulness of the original, nor does it mean the original users were guinea pigs.
Now when a product has zero utility in it's first version, that's different. But I would argue you should demand your money back at that point.
The biggest issue, in my experience, ends up being that most non-metal printed parts are relatively brittle and prone to the material rubbing off if the outer layers are even lightly abraded. Ytec3D gets around this by soaking the prints with a liquid glue to solidify the bonds, but between that and the cleanup environment (compressed air, brushes, respirators) it's a hard sell for consumers.
EDIT: It's also important to note that FFF/FDM (extrusion-based) printers are getting much closer to 'freedom to print anything you want'. This year, I feel like multi-extrusion systems are going to become much more mainstream, allowing users to print more complex objects with support material that can be dissolved away later (e.g. ABS with HIPS support).
[2] http://h10124.www1.hp.com/campaigns/ga/3dprinting/4AA5-5472E...
They also consume a lot of power, usually requiring industrial power hookups.
edit: here is a nice picture of such a setup
https://www.solidconcepts.com/content/images/repeatable-proc...
Those white tubes going up out of the machine are the extraction channels.
I'm sure 3d printer tech will end up with ready to use devices, printing metals as well as various kinds of other materials. I may prefer buying a panel and electronics, and print my own metal enclosure for my next monitor (or external disk or electric outlet or back cover of my phone or... you get the idea). Cost will be a factor, but after the utility.
To be honest I don't know enough about industrial pricing to understand if it's ridiculous or not, 30x from raw material to something being retailed at a consumer level doesn't seem unbelievable to me.
Markup on a black ink cartridge (the original comparison) is something in the region of 200x, so nearly an order of magnitude higher.
The only reason why 3D printing became main stream is because some patents expired and printers are being sold as kit instead of a product.
I spent a bit of time on 3d printing forums and from what I can tell its just figurine printing and hobbyist screwing around. These photos are very telling:
http://maukcc.blogspot.com/2013/03/comparison-between-sla-an...
A low price SLA would be a serious game changer. The Kudo3D project will be interesting to watch. I'd much rather spend $2000 on something that prints beautifully than $600 on something that will print "piled spaghetti."
Interesting comment from the Kudo3D person on reddit with some details:
http://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/25teeg/kudo3d_ce...
I would be interested to hear how frequently the Printrbot gets a clogged extruder vs. the Stratasys, what print quality on ABS looks like between the two units, what happens when you have a more complex shape with a lot of overhangs, etc. Aside from warranty service, what are the advantages of the professional system?
A better comparison would be with the Fortus line which is used in commercial applications for functional products.
If I want to print a mug I'd want it done in 5 minutes and cost $1, otherwise what's the point of owning one from the point of view that one of these will be in every household. Does anyone know if the current materials have any hard limits on them as to how fast they can be manipulated for example?
This capability is useless if you're making mugs but it is priceless when you're prototyping.
Making mugs is entirely the wrong application.
Any specialized machine can absolutely annihilate the volume printer on the basis of cost, and for many things also on the basis of quality, but you have to produce thousands of units to pay for the machine.
You don't even need it to be a prototype. You just need to be making something that no one else needs--or not enough other people to warrant building a specialized machine to make that thing.
But then, if you do need that specialized machine, maybe there only needs to be one of those, and you have just the right sort of machine to make unique items....
Nothing beats a cheap ceramic mug for mug-ness.
And that goes for pretty much any one-off produced with a 3D printer that attempts to re-create a mass produced item. It'll be more expensive, more fragile, less pretty and in general less functional and strong.
For mugs, that means constructing a plaster mold, then using liquid clay (slip) to fill the mold. The clay is dried, glazed, and fired. If your mug design is not already unique, someone else already does this faster and more cheaply than you can. But if you want 20 mugs shaped like your own head, you're still only going to volume-print one copy.
Or maybe you're making mugs out of food-grade silicone elastomer instead of ceramic. You still only need one printed copy.
The point is not to make a mug, the mug is a benchmark. The point is that it takes a nontrivial amount of time, the model readily available, it is repeatable, and it has some very interesting properties WRT complex curves and overhanging structures.
(Like all benchmarks, we can argue from now to forever whether it is a good benchmark.)
Granted, there are many online services now which will 3d print parts for you with very high quality and about 1 week turn around, so owning your own 3d printer is not always a good financial move for a business, depending on the desired uses.
For the person printing things on the average "cheap" printer, they're not typically concerned with the longevity aspect. Most 3D-printed things seem to be the opposite for mainstream applications. People keep using examples of printing "stuff you can't get at Walmart" and implying the printed parts are expected to be used for many years in an environment that will have some moderate amount of wear and tear.
3D printing not only needs to get faster by an order of magnitude, the quality of the output component needs to increase substantially as well. You need to be able to print in colors and wind up with a finished product that looks close to the quality of an injected molded piece.
In our current throwaway-oriented manufacturing and product distribution civilization, it irks me to landfill perfectly good objects for want of a very small plastic part. It isn't the gross materials cost compared to the mass-manufactured cost that I evaluate in these situations, it is the logistical tail externalities cost I impose upon my descendents for landfilling objects that could be used with a modest (to my income level) investment in repairing it. This observes the "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" mantra by reducing the waste stream through repairing.
There is a rant embedded there, on waste streams are a sign of technological backwardness as a riff on Iain Banks' "money is a sign of poverty", but that's for another time.
A couple of examples to illustrate.
A door bell ringer that has a base mounted to the door frame and then the housing slips over the base and latches in with a simple catch in the base. The housing was ripped off the base (toddler Destruct-O-Tron), and upon inspection it was the simple catch that tore off. The catch is the size of a fingernail clipping. It's long gone.
Customer service at the manufacturer was sympathetic, but unable to help; they acknowledged they had the bases, but it just wasn't in their procedures to send it separately even if I was willing to pay for it. If I have a 3D scanner+printer, I could create another base with that catch, instead of ordering an entire ringer and landfilling a working ringer for want of a fingernail-clipping size piece of plastic. When I ordered the replacement ringer, I not only threw away the plastic, but also the PC board (though I salvaged the battery), and contributed my small part to converting nasty bunker fuel oil into emissions and engaging the exhaustively long supply chain it took to create the replacement ringer (including a few drops more oil to create the virgin plastics that went into the new ringer).
That's just me, but multiply by billions of people making similar decisions over the next few decades as a burgeoning global middle class arises from the externalities wreckage wrought by our current globalization implementation, and it gets ugly fast.
Another example. A sippy cup is designed with a small plastic rocker at the top that lets a straw flip up and down [1]. That rocker can be pried off, and eventually is lost somewhere in the house until a few years later when it is found in some nook. Without the rocker, the cup leaks when upside down. The manufacturer has stopped making the product, in favor of a new version with an incompatible rocker; this manufacturer turned out to be willing to ship just replacement rockers, but they only had the new style on hand. Off to the landfill the cup goes, and I order replacement old style cups from dwindling retailer inventories. Unless I have access to a 3D scanner+printer.
The state of technology is sufficient as-is today to let me more than satisfactorily solve these situations without resorting to a replacement purchase, and about 1-3 instances come up every week. Double that occurrence frequency if I got a metal laser sintering 3D printer. I could refine various products with small, custom silicone bumpers/insulators/grips/etc. by creating silicone molds with a 3D printer. The applications only increase as the 3D printing technology advances. These are only the simple, obvious applications; much greater changes and improvements in industrial product design, manufacturing, externalities reduction, sales, marketing, support and distribution lie ahead when we combine these immediate applications to other developments.
[1] http://c3.q-assets.com/images/products/p/mc/mc-083_1z.jpg