
Why buying a 3D printer sucks - nick_sanford
https://thre3d.com/blog/inside-thre3d/buying-3d-printers-sucks/
======
georgemcbay
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...](http://www.makerfarm.com/index.php/prusa-8-i3v-kit-v-slot-
extrusion.html)

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.

~~~
kenjinp
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
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.

~~~
leoc
The history of the synthesiser market seems relevant here. From Bob
Johnstone's /We Were Burning/ [http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-
Entrepreneurs-Electron...](http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-
Entrepreneurs-Electronic/dp/0465091180/) , pp. 230-231
[http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-
Electron...](http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-
Electronic/dp/0465091180/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1401863926&sr=8-1&keywords=we+were+burning)
(or Search Inside for "Keith Emerson"):

> 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.

~~~
leoc
> his synthesizers were only meant to be audio equipment

Whoops: that should say "his synthesizers were only meant to be _studio_
equipment".

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

~~~
riffraff
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
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.

~~~
kenjinp
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.

------
Dorian-Marie
Side note: I get an SSL error on
[https://www.thre3d.com/](https://www.thre3d.com/)

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

------
jglauche
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.

------
bri3d
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.

~~~
kenjinp
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.

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

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

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

~~~
kenjinp
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.

