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Breaking Up With MakerBot

Posted by Soulskill on from the caught-cheating-with-stratasys dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Sanders Kleinfeld explains how his experiences with a Makerbot device led him to the decision that 3-D printing hasn't quite arrived as a legitimate, consumer-friendly technology. Quoting: 'Waiting five hours for your Yoda feels like an eternity; you can play approximately sixty rounds of Candy Crush Saga in that same timeframe (although arguably, staring blankly at the MakerBot is equally intellectually stimulating). To make matters worse, I’d estimate MakerBot’s failure rate fell in the range of 25%–33%, which meant that there was around a one-in-three chance that two hours in, your Yoda print would fail, or that it would finish but once it was complete, you’d discover it was warped or otherwise defective. ... The first-generation MakerBot Replicator felt too much like a prototype, as opposed to a proven, refined piece of hardware. I look forward to the day when 3D printers are as cheap, ubiquitous, and easy to use as their 2D inkjet printer counterparts.'"

2 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. There's no point in denying it by OhANameWhatName · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    ushering in the “Wild West of 3D printing” among our sedate sea of MacBook Air laptops running Adobe InDesign

    Once again Apple's walled garden has broken the potential of a wonderful technology freedom. At what point do we all put pillow cases on our heads and hunt down the MacoPhytes? We should do it before Apple ruins the potential for us to print our 3d guns or there's no hope left!!

  2. Re:Remember the first CD Burners... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    See? Another one bringing up information processing that only requires a tiny signal to make a tiny change on a tiny bit of (mass-produced in a factory by single-purpose machines fed with industrial-grade chemical feedstocks and with dozens of workers) material, complete with redundancy and error-checking, in two dimensions.

    Why would you extrapolate that to placing matter in 3D with no error correction and no redundancy? How does that compare? Why would you think that's at all relevant or comparable?

    Remember when computers only had 16K of memory? Now they have 16 gigs! So jet engines will also get a million times more thrust soon! LOL RITE!?

    Can you tell me if that extrapolation is valid or not? And why you think that?