Do you hate your desktop 3D printer? I’m thinking a growing number of operators think exactly that.
Hating a machine is something you’d expect if a machine tends to break, misbehaves or otherwise is troublesome. That’s actually been the case with most desktop 3D printers for the past 15 years, although reliability has slowly increased.
Even so, most desktop 3D printers require a considerable amount of tweaking and expertise to coax out the best possible result. That can be frustrating, for sure, but due to the nature of the technology it’s become an expected experience. Old timers would say to novices: “it will take you six months to figure it out”.
But things are changing.
In the past year there has been quite a change in the desktop 3D printing market. The days of selling an open gantry, manually calibrated FFF machine are basically done.
New machines that have emerged in the past year typically include a slew of sensors and smart software that make the machines vastly more reliable, capable and practical than anything seen before.
We’ve seen this first hand in our lab. We’re constantly reviewing different 3D printers, and more or less they’ve been of similar capabilities — until last year. Suddenly the machines all became far smarter — and far more reliable.
It’s now a given that the machine will produce a near-perfect first print, right out of the box. Up until a year ago, that wasn’t the case.
In our lab we have the luxury of seeing new machines constantly, but that’s not the case with most desktop 3D printer operators. Typically one would purchase a device and hope to use it for a few years.
This means there are enormous numbers of operators out there in the world with machines a year or two old. So old that they don’t include the current machine capabilities and reliabilities.
What does this imply? I believe a growing number of 3D printer operators are now looking at their older 3D printers with disappointment, as recent machines basically put them all to shame.
Newer machines are not only more reliable, but also far faster. Most of today’s products use advanced firmware techniques to compensate for high speed vibrations, enabling far faster print speeds.
The speed advantage is more dramatic than you might expect. In our lab we recently replaced three Prusa MK3S 3D printers with three Bambu Lab units. The Bambu Lab machines are about 5X faster than the older MK3S units, meaning we now have the throughput equivalent of 15 MK3S 3D printers!
This is the conundrum now seen by many 3D printer operators. They may have their own Prusa MK3S, Ender-3, Vyper or other machines that suddenly look very old.
The increasing releases of improved new equipment just adds to this new kind of 3D printer frustration.
I believe that there will be a significant wave of machine replacements this year, as more operators realize their existing equipment is rapidly becoming obsolete.
Do you hate your older 3D printer?
