Why buying a 3D printer sucks

https://thre3d.com/blog/inside-thre3d/buying-3d-printers-sucks/

by nick_sanford • 12 years ago

34 19 12 years ago

thre3d.com

Dorian-Marie• 12 years ago

Side note: I get an SSL error on https://www.thre3d.com/

nick_sanford• 12 years ago

Hey, thanks for the heads up! We will get that fixed ASAP.

jstoja• 12 years ago

Very good article indeed, you've made your point.

dlevine• 12 years ago

I appreciate the guide to the printing processes (https://thre3d.com/how-it-works/3d-printing-process). As an outsider to the industry, I didn't realize how many there were.

riffraff• 12 years ago

seconded.

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.

habosa• 12 years ago

Couldn't agree more. I just took the plunge and backed the new Mod-t printer on Indiegogo. I previously had experience with the Luzlbot and the Makerbot Replicator.

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.

kenjinp4• 12 years ago

Yes! This is the goal. It's very difficult to explain these specifications, and I don't think our website has reached that goal yet, although it's an exciting problem to try to solve.

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.

bri3d• 12 years ago

Agree that 3D printers are hard to compare - while reading, I thought of yet another thing that doesn't seem to be mentioned in the article or on the site: speed.

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.

kenjinp4• 12 years ago

Speed is difficult, because for many applications you don't want it. Speed means more heat, and more heat means higher chance to fail with step loss or other problems

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.

georgemcbay• 12 years ago

The current state of affordable 3D printers is such that you will get much more variation of print quality due to [mis]calibration of an individual printer than you will from printer model to printer model.

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.

kenjinp4• 12 years ago

Lulzbot is a great company, and they've been around for years already.

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.

hayksaakian• 12 years ago

Maybe this logic made sense with the advent of the first printing press, but with the advent of the commodity paper printer, the entire industry is leaps and bounds more accessible.

The 3d printer industry needs something like the wrt54g -- hackable for enthusiasts, and "just works" for mom and dad.

JeanBC• 12 years ago

You know what else sucks about buying a 3D printer? The cost of shipping one outside the United States.

kenjinp4• 12 years ago

That's a huge problem. Here's why:

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.

jglauche2• 12 years ago

To where exactly? Europe is pretty well covered in 3d printer shops.

eric_khun• 12 years ago

Cool feature: There is an overview of all the 3dprinters on their site https://thre3d.com/category/printers and you can order by buildsize/price

jglauche2• 12 years ago

The article does complain about lack of uniformed information about the printers, then advertise their search feature and then their shop. They seem to have inserted a lot of metadata about printers, but actually you can't search for those.

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.

Why buying a 3D printer sucks

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