@Jason_Cramer Almost all hobbyist 3D printers are open source. I’d definitely argue that all the best ones (in terms of value and quality of prints) are. MakerBot stuff and many of the Kickstarter projects are built on the backs of the open source movement, but they don’t contribute anything back to the community. They replace R&D departments with marketing and hype.
It’s just slapping together a bunch of open source stuff, jamming it into a proprietary chassis, then marking it up by some arbitrary amount.
Why buy from their like when companies like Deezmaker or Lulzbot will sell you a very high-quality, tuned, open-source machine that can outperform a Replicator 2 any day for a grand less, and they’ll do it while making all their designs fully open source? Or when you can source a Mendel90, Huxley, or Tricolor Mendel kit for less than a grand and build a machine you’ll understand and be able to repair from the ground up?
Replicator 2 has an awful extruder. My local hackerspace has one and I often see people pushing plastic into it by hand so it won’t strip. I said I would replace it with $30 in parts but they claimed it has a proprietary mounting system, which would be absolutely ridiculous. I’ve been meaning to check if they’re right about that…
@Robert_Rodgers that is probably the single worst 3d printer you could buy. The company has famously awful tech support and you need to buy 3-4x overpriced proprietary filament cartridges to use it.
Why would you support a company that tries to screw you into proprietary filament? Regardless of how awful their machine is, that’s one scummy practice which really says a lot about how they’ll treat you as a customer.
@Miles_Wilford You’ve claimed a few times now that MakerBot doesn’t contribute to the open source community, but that’s incorrect. In reality almost all of MBI’s software is open source. The only proprietary software is their branded GUI, but everything behind it (Conveyor, Miracle Grue, Skeinforge, firmware, etc.) is open source, with MBI contributing all of their code into GitHub repositories. So if you want to write your own GUI, it can call all of the same open source pieces. And they’re quite supportive of the Sailfish firmware (also open source, great software). So while they did close the GUI (to protect their branding) you can, and they often recommend, printing using the entirely open source stack.
I agree about The Cube. They’ve recently done some distribution deals (Staples, others), which I fear will generate sales to people who don’t know better, and their aggressively DRM and proprietary approach is very bad for consumers. If you like their printer, I’d suggest looking at the Afinia printer. The Cube is a repackaged Afinia printer, and if you buy it from Afinia you get the same nice mechanism, without DRM. Still proprietary software, though.
@Anthony_Truss I am pretty sure that the 2x uses a threaded extruder, just like the rest of MBI’s printers. And pretty much every other extruding printer.
If 3D Systems puts plenty of resources to create a truly “hit print and go” printer and fully support their customers, I don’t see any problem with them charging a premium to continue to use their printer. As long as the printer truly adds value and people are willing to pay for it, why not? It’s may be a business model that you don’t agree with, but it is a business model – if an open design can deliver better value, support the customers, and market that successfully, they’ll undercut 3D Systems… Ultimately, the customers win, even if it starts out being expensive.
Sure, they’re certainly allowed to try whatever they like (if it’s legal, etc.). But people should know before buying it that the company quite aggressively extracts money from their customers for things that are normally free or much more affordable, so not only is the printer not terribly cheap to purchase, but the vendor does its best to hide the fact that the cost of ownership is very high. The most obvious problem is that the printer uses DRM to lock you into buying filament only from 3D Systems. They refuse to say how much filament is in a cartridge, or how much is usable (it stops printing before the filament runs out), but buyers estimate that the usable filament costs 5-10x the market rate. That’s not the only sleazy thing they do - 3D Systems has a habit of showing off 3D prints from their (very nice) high end printers, and letting people believe that they get that from their cheap home printer, presumably because 3D Systems can “up sell” disappointed customers to their (extra cost) print service. They also don’t tell people that they require a consumable liquid to coat the build platform, where a tiny bottle is $10, driving up cost of usage even higher. Finally, steering users into buying designs from a paid (but low quality copies of designs originally posted elsewhere) design marketplace, so new buyers pay money for marginal designs when there are a better selection of higher quality designs available for free elsewhere, is yet another ripoff. Yes, it’s all (probably, IANAL) legal, but it’s (IMO) a bad thing for the industry for a company to target new buyers who don’t know better, and take advantage of their naivety to rip them off so aggressively. The end result could be a lot of people feeling burned, turning them off of 3D printing altogether.
That’s why it’s important to communicate the tradeoffs that buying a Cube entails. That is, it’s a nice mechanism, but IMO if you like the Cube you’d be much happier with the Afinia. For a marginally higher cost you pay 1/10th as much for supplies, can access an unlimited range of colors and materials to print with, and have a heated build platform so you can use a wider range of materials.
Why have none of you so much as mentioned the Ultimaker yet?
It’s quite possibly hands down the perfect machine for this price range, with a pretty damn big size, nearly 0 fuss because of Cura (which Ultimaker now develops in-house), and they haven’t been hostile to the open source community.
The solidoodle is poop, makerbot regularly rips things from the open source community and calls it theirs, the printrbots are cheap but of lower quality, the BFB is from 3DSystems which are currently practicing patent warfare on the 3D printer community (with the Form1 labs UV resin printer), kickstarter printers are a crap-shoot (don’t know what kind of quality etc you’ll get from them)…
Lulzbot is a good choice too, as they’re a contributor to the open source community.
So really, the best choices here are:
Mendel90 Kit (Assemble yourself)
Ultimaker (preassembled)
or Lulzbot (preassembled)
Don’t hate the makerbots. I likely wouldn’t have a 3D Printer if it weren’t for them. They do provide great support for what they sell too. I haven’t had too many problems with my ToM…but the conveyor belt system that it came with was useless…I’d rather have had an extra $100 in my pocket. My filament rarely strips (Makerbot Filament) in the MK7 extruder. When it does usually it’s because I was pushing the speed way beyond the original design envelope of the printer.
I’ve seen great results from a lot a printers and it all comes down to how mechanically inclined you are and how much you like to tinker. Some printers yield much better results out-of-the-box with very little tinkering than others. I’ve even seen good results from a Printrbot (but to get there it took tinkering).
Shop around and know your skill level before you buy.