The 3D Printers of CES: Extruders, Nozzles, and Metal Medium (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: It's that time of year again, the Consumer Electronics Show leaks out of every media crevice. Although we've passed peak 3D Printing hype for the general public, the 3D Printer offerings being shown are notable in one way or another. Makerbot continues to flounder with questionable extruders, Lulzbot continues to excel with dual extrusion and by supporting a wide range of print materials, 3D Systems has an uber-expensive direct metal printer, but the entry level printer price floor keeps falling.

Comments

cynic real world translation of article here

[gl4ss]

it's just plastic.

makerbots new extruder: makes for "better" reliability. the old one on the 5th gen makerbots(that won best of the year awards at ces based on prints done with previous generation makerbots) was so bad that it would have bankrupted makerbot if stratasys had not bought them a little earlier(I am not kidding, huge consumer returns on the 5th gen line because it did not work reliably). the replicator 1 and 2 extruders were modifiable easily to be much, much, much more reliable. the fallout was so bad that they had to close their consumer support forums. those forums had provided users of previous generations with tips and tricks how to actually make the machines do what they are supposed to do, but due to design and closed source policy with the 5th generation the community was unable to do so.

ultimakers exchangeabe nozzle: yeah uh, the article says that this is a feature not seen commonly. but in real life, of the cheap sub 1000$ printers, almost all have changeable nozzles apart from cube line or other drm'd in some way or another systems. ultimakers extruder design was an outlier. in fact, even the mentioned makerbot has had changeable nozzles since forever.

lulzbot has a new dual extruder. they already had a dual extruder that seems pretty much the same in design. who cares.

the 3d systems laser sintering machine? here's a hint. the lineup of this generation has already 100, 200, and 300 models. just a new model in old line. cool, yes, new technology? no. consumer technology? fuck no.

nothing noteworthy to consumer was announced. absolutely nothing. none of the extruders are providing anything new. makerbots smart extruder+ is a band aid design change on their already on the market model(ironically still being inferior to their previous generation, while being way more expensive. it has nothing in it to justify the large price tag).