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3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500

254 points by hharnisch 10y ago

st3v3r 10y ago
The professional printer printed out almost 4x the amount of material in the same time (100% infill vs 25%). If it had the same settings for hollow infill, it likely would have been much, much faster.
aleon 10y ago
This is an unfair comparison.. Having used a Stratasys Objet of around a similar price point, the amount of detail you can get is incredible -- down to fractions of a millimeter. Sure, for the prints that were pictured in the comparison, either can do relatively well, but the point of higher end printers is for higher resolution prints, different materials, shapes of the print, etc. To ignore all of those use cases and focus on a generic print that a hobbyist would make, of course a hobbyist printer would suffice!
- graeham 10y ago
  Exactly - this is a pretty simple part, without fine details that would actually test an expensive printer. Its like comparing how Facebook or Word works on a netbook vs a top-end desktop. And I'd say furthermore, although not knowing how the part is used - with such flat features and 90-degree corners, probably the best way to make this would be sheet metal, which with a waterjet cutter, press break, and spot welder could be produced in 1/100th the time and cost.
- kragen 10y ago
  Every hobbyist printer can get down to fractions of a millimeter. I think 100μm surface roughness is typical.
Merad 10y ago
A few years ago in grad school I spent about a month designing a 3D printed case for a Raspberry Pi + Camera [0]. We used a Makergear M2 (a $2000 printer at the time). The process had some frustrating moments, but overall it was an amazing experience. 3D printers allow for a wonderful iterative design process. Come in in the morning, pull parts off of the printer, measure, test fit, etc. Tweak in CAD, or start working on the next part, and start printing your changes/additions before lunch. By mid afternoon the print is done, and you usually have time to do another round of changes that you can start printing before you leave for the day. Of course, this is all assuming that your printer is working continuously and that you're ok tossing a lot of filament from those test prints. My experience with the M2 was that typically I could get it dialed in and it would print great for 2-3 weeks before it started misbehaving. Sometimes it was a simple adjustment (re-level the bed, etc.), but most of the time there was no obvious indication of the problem, and I'd spend several frustrating days leveling, calibrating, cleaning, and generally tinkering until it started working consistently once again. There are also plenty of issues with the print quality and precision, but I've already written more than I intended, so I'll skip them. Needless to say, it was sufficient for our needs. IIRC, our final cost per case was $4 in material (PLA) with a print time of about 6 hours. It's a fascinating technology, and it's mind blowing how far it's come in the last decade. I'm not sure that the FFF/FDM style printers will ever get to the point where they're ready for use by the general public, but the overall technology is here to stay. I wouldn't be surprised to see 3D printers become as common as microwaves in my lifetime. [0]: http://i.imgur.com/JkF1WQ4.jpg http://i.imgur.com/JkF1WQ4.jpg
huuu 10y ago
If his conclusion were true companies like Shapeways would only use cheap hobby printers. But ofcourse it is not. Reliability, support, accuracy, all lacking with hobby printers.
- onion2k 10y ago
  If his conclusion were true companies like Shapeways would only use cheap hobby printers. But ofcourse it is not. It's far from a perfect analogy, but with servers Google demonstrated really well that the cost of high-end 'professional' equipment can be a waste of money where cheap, commodity kit can be used at scale instead. It's not completely unreasonable to think that a farm of cheap 3D printers could be used in place of one high-end model eventually.
  - baq 10y ago
    the difference in 3d printers and servers is rather hard to compare: different servers can compute the same result, faster, slower, but it'll be the same. not exactly true with 3d printers, where a result isn't binary.
    - dpark 10y ago
      Servers aren't actually binary, either. Your cheap server might serve the same result (binary), but performance might degrade under load more rapidly (nonbinary), the failure rate might be be higher (nonbinary), and the support for cheap hardware might be nonexistent (nonbinary). There's also the issue of SKU drift/mix as your cheap hardware fails and gets replaced with a different/newer SKU (adds maintenance cost, is also nonbinary). At the end of the day, the cost difference plus the ability to mitigate/hide the problems via software makes the commodity hardware the winning option, but it's not just a matter of "same bits come out; good enough". Commodity hardware is also not really cheap. These are 1U/2U servers that cost thousands of dollars. These are cheap relative to mainframes, but they're not consumer devices.
  - timlyo 10y ago
    The difference here is reliability. Commodity kit is generally reliable, just slower; whereas cheap 3d printers are more likely to fail a print/produce junk.
rebootthesystem 10y ago
It would have been nicer to have seen a comparison using the same material as well as a series of parts designed to test for specific issues in 3D printing. Add to this printing 100 copies of each part and we might have ended up with a useful set of data points.
- throwaway_exer 10y ago
  "It would have been nicer if you ran an experiment to assuage my personal interest, but I didn't write you a check for $50,000 to do so." FTFY.
tsomctl 10y ago
No mention at all of the strength/rigidity/hardness of the jigs. The professionally printed one was made from ABS, which is a harder plastic than HIPS. It is also possible that the professional machine bonds the plastic filament to the workpiece better. The best way to test this would be destructively. Of course, if the jig is just going to be used for a short period of time, structural integrity doesn't matter. And the hobbyist machines are just going to get better as technology improves.
- saidajigumi 10y ago
  Also missing from the discussion are tolerances. If the Stratasys is able to print meeting high significantly higher design tolerances, that alone could justify the price tag. Certainly in other areas of manufacturing, adding zeros to the accuracy/repeatability of a system often adds zeros directly to the price tag. If you can get a print hot off the printer and immediately say "LGTM" without further ado, that may just mean your application isn't very demanding.
  - Domenic_S 10y ago
    Underrated comment here. The same exact part can cost $20 or $2,000 to produce depending on tolerances!
Animats 10y ago
From the article: "One defect I observed on the Lulzbot printed part was the blade portion of the tool had a split in it from not bonding correctly. This was most likely a cause of pushing the 0.5mm nozzle to its limits in terms of layer height but a little glue and some pressure would fix this split no problem." Er, that's called a "reject" in manufacturing. This is the basic problem with low-end filament-type 3D printers - weak layer bonding. You're welding a hot thing to a cold thing, which never works well. And there's considerable thermal expansion, and thus shrinkage, in the material, which produces internal stresses between layers. That's where things crack.
- patcheudor 10y ago
  "This is the basic problem with low-end filament-type 3D printers - weak layer bonding. You're welding a hot thing to a cold thing, which never works well." Bonding always works well for me and many others. The author of this story choose to use a material (HIPS) which really should still be considered experimental for most FDM printers. I've personally never had a lot of luck with it and instead choose to use either PLA or ABS with a heated chamber & with those two materials can build very strong parts with no boding problems whatsoever. Here's an example of a violin I've recently printed: https://www.flickr.com/photos/patcheudor/26263996272/in/dateposted-public/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/patcheudor/26263996272/in/date... Note that I've now printed five violins and in the 100's of hours it has taken to do so not had a single failed print even when printing thin (typically .40 mm) shells.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Thin is the good case. It's thick parts that have problems. At TechShop, things seem to crack around 2cm-3cm thickness.
    - patcheudor 10y ago
      I routinely do thick 100% fill parts in ABS with no issues.
- stcredzero 10y ago
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I enjoyed this article, but perhaps not for the reasons the author hoped. This quote, "With some tweaks to my G code and use of a nozzle that is more suited for higher resolution prints I am confident that I could produce a part that would be very close to the quality of the Stratasys produced part." really summed it up. It sums to "I can tweak my setup and get this part to be good enough relative to the expensive machine." and that is great. What is missing is it is every friggin' part. Seriously, all of the $2,000 printers have quirks that hit based on part geometry, especially in ABS. Part too long? need to add hold down tabs to prevent warping. Too many overhangs? extra supports. Too long a tool travel? Up the hotend temperature so that the extruded material doesn't cool down to much. You can make great parts but every machine is different, and every part you make has a slightly different requirements. "Real" manufacturing tools are all about the repeatability and setup. Pretty much any machining center can take a gcode file, look at it, and adjust itself to make the best possible rendition, or warn you if it can't do so and meet its advertised tolerances. A hobby machine you print it, you tweak the parameters, you print it again, maybe you tweak the gcode a bit, and finally you print a really nice part. What gets you repeatability? measuring. There are so many things that you can measure and hobby machines don't. Who puts glass slides (accurate to a tenth of a micron) providing position feedback on the x, y, and z stages on a hobby machine? Nobody, the slides and readers cost $1K just by themselves. There has been some motion toward monitoring the feed of the filament to give a "stripped filament" warning, but who measures the actual flow? the temperature of the melt chamber and feed path? I really enjoy my 3D printer, I'm printing out a damper for a meat smoker as I write this, its going to be glorious, but its also the 3rd time I've printed this particular part to tune it up. We'll see how it works on the smoker.
- baq 10y ago
  i haven't ever used or owned a 3d printer and this part >This quote, "With some tweaks to my G code and use of a nozzle that is more suited for higher resolution prints I am confident that I could produce a part that would be very close to the quality of the Stratasys produced part." really summed it up. It sums to "I can tweak my setup and get this part to be good enough relative to the expensive machine." and that is great. What is missing is it is every friggin' part. is sooo true regardless of discipline. /rant on sure, you can make vim/emacs/sublime or macos/linux/windows behave just like you want, but you have to do this on every box you ever touch (disclaimer: i use vim). as i get older, the more i want my tools to just work, without tweaking for hours that requires deep knowledge about the system i'm customizing, to the point of willing to pay money to get the customizing part done for me. in this case, the $200k machine most likely isn't used by a single person who knows everything about its quirks, so it's all the more important for it to work correctly without tweaking, on the first try. i wish more software was like that. /rant off
taitems 10y ago
Surely the high gloss finish on the black material is drawing attention to a lot of the flaws as well? I'd really like to see a same colour comparison between the two.
dbrgn 10y ago
Using different material and different infill is a bit of an unfair comparison. Using 100% infill causes more problems with warping due to shrinkage, thus increasing the difficulty. Using 25% avoids this, but decreases stability a bit. Regarding the print quality in general, I think an Ultimaker 2+ would give you better results (also at a price of 2500$).
dbrgn 10y ago
Here's another interesting comparison: $20,000 vs $600: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/3DPrinterShootout600PrintrbotVs20000UPrintSEPlus.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/3DPrinterShootout600PrintrbotV...
willvarfar 10y ago
I have never seen a 3D printer, although I have seen a model (of a house plan) made with a 3D printer. You folks who live near civilization and 'make' communities are so lucky! :) Are there any 3D printers that integrate a milling machine? I imagine a machine that prints the model slightly oversize, milling and then perhaps finally warming the surface to polish it, all as it goes... I would love to have access to a hobby 3D printer as I have this idea that won't die about making a cylindrical version of the Enigma http://wiki.franklinheath.co.uk/index.php/Enigma/Paper_Enigma http://wiki.franklinheath.co.uk/index.php/Enigma/Paper_Enigm... with glowire or alternatively tracks for ball bearings, as a cheap present people can buy at, say, Bletchley Park gift shop. Silly thing to get fixated on.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > Are there any 3D printers that integrate a milling machine? No, and there likely never will be. Why would you wait for hours to then still have to mill down your final product when all the advantages of 3D printing are then lost and all the advantages of milling are lost? The advantages of 3D printing are that as an additive process it will work in many environments where a subtractive process would not, the advantages of milling are that - as a substractive process - it can make a final result that is substantially stronger than most of the things you could do with a 3D printer and that it most likely is much faster. Re-working or finishing like that is typically reserved for casting and other cheap mass production processes.
  - ansgri 10y ago
    Actually, there is: http://us.dmgmori.com/products/lasertec/lasertec-additivemanufacturing/lasertec-65-3d http://us.dmgmori.com/products/lasertec/lasertec-additiveman... "By combining both, additive manufacturing via powder nozzle and the traditional cutting method in one machine, totally new applications and geometries are possible."
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      Wow. Thank you for proving me wrong and finding that. > totally new applications and geometries are possible It'd be nice to have some concrete examples of those.
blahi 10y ago
This seems like an interesting hobby. How much time is needed to achieve a reasonably high understanding of this work? Not industrial grade expert, but a knowledgeable layman. And where/how can I educate myself?
- armamut 10y ago
  I'm not even an engineer, and I have made one. But, making a 3D printer by yourself from ground up (or assembling one with the parts bought from china etc.) takes a lot of time. I only paid attention at my spare times, so it took my months. But I must say that, it is a very satisfying hobby. I strongly recommend it :) But if you want to buy one, you can find very nice 3D printers at $250 - $300 range from aliexpress etc. It may take hours, a day or a week for calibration (depending on your printer model and printed part quality expectations), and you are good to go. But I must say that, 3D printers need maintenance and that can take your time as well. If you want to educate yourself, http://reprap.org/ http://reprap.org/ is the site you would want to visit. Not only for making your own printer, but calibrating and maintaining a bought 3D printer as well...
  - blahi 10y ago
    No, I meant using a 3d printer to build cool stuff.
    - mlni 10y ago
      As a start you can just go to Thingiverse to search for a model that fills your need and send it to the printer. That would take you all of a couple of minutes. Per try, until it comes out ok. If you want to try your hand at 3d modelling then you'll probably download Sketchup as a start and noodle around while watching youtube tutorials on the side. In about 8h you'll feel confident enough to actually model something meaningful. After ~40h you'll be able to knock together a model quite proficiently. After you'll have gotten tired of Skethub producing broken STLs and not allowing you to change your mind after modelling a thing, you'd move on to one of the real CAD software package, like Solidworks or Fusion 360 (which is great for beginners, btw). That rabbithole goes exactly as deep as you've got time for :) Fiddling with the printing itself will take a bit of setup time before each print and then a lengthy wait (hours to days) to get the result, or see it fail in some new and unfunny way. It's not really all that difficult, to be honest, just takes some time to develop an intuition about what's likely to fail.
lawless123 10y ago
The difference between food at a good restaurant and a great restaurant isn't huge. The price however usually is.
rnestler 10y ago
What's also important when comparing 3D printers is maintenance cost and effort. For example: The Ultimaker 2 we have in our Hackerspace needs regular replacement (about every 600 printing hours) of the PTFE Coupler (hot end part). Also sometimes you need to perform a cold pull (https://ultimaker.com/en/resources/19510-how-to-apply-atomic-method https://ultimaker.com/en/resources/19510-how-to-apply-atomic...) if the nozzle is clogged.
GnarfGnarf 10y ago
3D printing, especially hobbyist machines, is still in its infancy and produces disappointing results. A large flat piece warps. The resolution is coarse. It takes too long to produce even a simple piece. The machine needs constant monitoring. It's at the equivalent of the DOS stage of personal computing. I wrote code to produce STL files. These files are accepted by hobbyist printers. I sent it to a professional shop, they complained one of my triangles wasn't closed, couldn't fix it or tell me which it was. Wonderful.
- MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
  You probably knew this one, but still: http://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com/post/113272014704/sure-we-have-a-3d-printer http://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com/post/113272014704/sure...
  - GnarfGnarf 10y ago
    That looks so sad :o(
3dprinted 10y ago
Neat project comparing FDM. Now, let's be a little more fair and start looking at what production companies will be buying: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/printers/3d-printers.html http://www8.hp.com/us/en/printers/3d-printers.html http://www.stratasys.com/3d-printers/production-series http://www.stratasys.com/3d-printers/production-series No contest. Having multiple hundreds of thousands of colors, properties (like heat-resistance, flexibility, different opacity), various different materials, automated easily removable supports, decent precision, and serious speed beats the shit out of your desktop model any day of the week. Sorry.
LELISOSKA 10y ago
aren't resin printers increments better than normal 3d printers?
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  Yes, SLA printers like the Form 2 do offer better print resolutions than FDM printers of a similar price. http://formlabs.com/products/3d-printers/form-2/ http://formlabs.com/products/3d-printers/form-2/ The downside is they can't work with as wide a range of materials compared to FDM printers, and the materials they can work with tend to be more expensive.
globuous 10y ago
I'd like to see a similar post ten years from now, see how things have evolved. I didn't realise how precise some of these industrial 3D printers were! This gives me a lot of hope as to what I might have in my house in a decade.
JabavuAdams 10y ago
What a weird article! The low-cost part is as good as the high-cost part ... except in all of these ways that it's not, that I will outline here. Oh, and I basically just eyeballed them, instead of measuring them. Oh, when pieces were missing due to failure to print, I just kind of assume that they would have printed okay with some tweaks. What!? Amusing.
Certified 10y ago
"The Stratasys printed part was printed with ABS material, 100% infill with a standard layer height on normal detail settings. Not having direct access to the machine I was not able to extract any real nitty gritty details on the overall print set up. For the Lulzbot print that I created I used HIPS material with a 0.5mm nozzle, 0.1mm layer height, 25% infill, 4 top and bottom solid layers, 45 mm/s print speed with standard acceleration, 240C extrusion temperature, 110C bed temperature, and an extrusion width of 0.6mm." This is an apple to oranges comparison. I work with a Lulzbot 5, a Lulzbot Mini, a Stratasys dimension elite, and two polyprinters on a daily basis and have been working with 3D printers for over 10 years as part of my job. Why was a material like HIPS ever used for comparison with ABS if both machines can print with ABS? Why was the extrusion width 0.6mm on a 0.5mm nozzle? Why is he comparing a 100% fill print with a 25% fill print? Why didn't he mention that the Lulzbot Taz 5 he was using has a $500 print head upgrade to let it print soluble support material as well? This whole article just reeks of either someone who is either very new and inexperienced to Hobby 3D printers or was intentionally trying to make the TAZ 5 look bad. I have done similar comparison studies myself and have come to drastically different conclusions. We sold the dimension elite a while ago.
- Guthur 10y ago
  I'm not familiar with the tech but having read the article I feel he was very positive about the TAZ 5 and so doubt he was going out of his way to make it look bad.
- avs733 10y ago
  I had some of the same questions...my suspicion is basically two fold 1) the infill change may have been intended to make the print times comparable (he suggested both were about 18 hrs) 2) He may have been attempting to compare the default (or default-ish) settings of each machine
  - MikeAPD 10y ago
    Hi, I wrote this article. To answer your suspicions. 1) Realistically they are within an hour of each other regardless of infill so the total print time was negligible in this experiment. A few changes on both machines could make either or print much faster. 2) Yes, it was my intention to have the same layer heights and overall print settings as close to each other as I could.
spriggan3 10y ago
3D Printing is really great for industrial designers who want to prototype products. My uncle is an industrial designer and I remember how costly it used to be for him to come up with a simple prototype. Today a $2500 printer can get one pretty far in a few hours, trully revolutionary. It gives a greater margin for experimentation, trial and error.
MikeAPD 10y ago
Hi, I wrote the article. I am really enjoying the comments everyone has contributed. One major detail I left out was the amount of failed parts that came out of the professional machine prior to getting a good one. I was unaware of the reject rate at the time I wrote this. In addition, the production tool ended up having resin added and then sanded to cover up some of the imperfections on the "professional" print.
- kragen 10y ago
  What was the reject rate? Also, some of us have asked some other questions about tolerances and material properties in other comments on here; could you answer them? I'm sorry about the somewhat intemperate comments of some of the other commenters.
  - MikeAPD 10y ago
    I can't give you an exact reject rate but it went through at least 3 iterations before being acceptable. As for tolerances and material properties (overall strength of the part) the Stratasys machine is superior in both aspects. As I mentioned in the conclusion of the article, I would like to do more experiments on the parts including dimensional analysis and possibly a tensile or compression test. Having 1 data point (1 tool from each machine) wouldn't be the best results for an accurate comparison but I would still be interested in the results.
dekhn 10y ago
I see cheap 3D printers like I saw linux in 1995: not quite the functional equivalent of a $100K SGI workstation, but still a great way to get experience in the area. You just have to understand that much of your time will be spent tuning the printer, and fixing it, and upgrading it. I don't know that the Statasys fails nearly as often as a cheap printer.
dekhn 10y ago
Be aware that the high end printers include features that are patented, for example soluble support, heated build chambers, etc, all have IP around them that may prevent companies selling inexpensive printers from including those features directly. This could translate to better results from the high end printers.
progman 10y ago
3d printer testers should use a default model with complex geometry which makes comparison much easier. For instance, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1019228 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1019228
kragen 10y ago
I read this whole article hoping to find the part where he tests the tensile strength, impact resistance, stiffness, and dimensional accuracy of the two parts. It never came. Except for the part where he had a delamination ("split"), which I guess means zero strength for that part of the part. I've been fairly disappointed with the strength of Prusa-Mendel-printed parts I've made. Even if you don't have complete delaminations, it's easy to get poor layer adhesion, which makes the parts fall apart under the least strain. You can fight that by turning up the temperature and filament feed rate, at the cost of dimensional accuracy (which you can compensate for in theory but I haven't done so successfully, being just an amateur) but the higher heat also weakens the PLA. Maybe this weakening is hydrolysis due to water absorption in the filament; I don't have a way to measure that, except printing the same thing a second time after dehydrating the filament, which I haven't done. I was surprised to find that 100% infill is not always the strongest option, even holding part geometry constant. Lower infill settings produce a more compliant part, and it can consequently withstand higher impact energies. I don't think you should hold part geometry constant when changing machines or especially entire fabrication technologies. You should play to the strengths of the machine you have. I know that's contrary to the outlook of 3D printing, but it's true. Things like topology optimization can easily generate forms that are impossible to injection-mold, relatively easy to FDM, and much stronger. If you have the option of 25% infill, you can probably get a stronger part by deploying the plastic you saved as ribs outside the main body. And so on.
crumpled 10y ago
"The Stratasys machine uses a separate dissolvable support material that can be washed away with a special salt water solution." This can be achieved with dual extruder models Makerbot 2X or its FlashForge clone, under $2500. Use HIPS as the support material, print in ABS and dissolve HIPS in d-limonene.
lunchTime42 10y ago
Additive manufacturing is bad from the getgo. Anything with errors, adding upon with errors, is unsuitable for large scale precision manufacturing.

254 points by hharnisch 10y ago

The professional printer printed out almost 4x the amount of material in the same time (100% infill vs 25%). If it had the same settings for hollow infill, it likely would have been much, much faster.

aleon 10y ago

This is an unfair comparison.. Having used a Stratasys Objet of around a similar price point, the amount of detail you can get is incredible -- down to fractions of a millimeter. Sure, for the prints that were pictured in the comparison, either can do relatively well, but the point of higher end printers is for higher resolution prints, different materials, shapes of the print, etc. To ignore all of those use cases and focus on a generic print that a hobbyist would make, of course a hobbyist printer would suffice!

graeham 10y ago
Exactly - this is a pretty simple part, without fine details that would actually test an expensive printer. Its like comparing how Facebook or Word works on a netbook vs a top-end desktop. And I'd say furthermore, although not knowing how the part is used - with such flat features and 90-degree corners, probably the best way to make this would be sheet metal, which with a waterjet cutter, press break, and spot welder could be produced in 1/100th the time and cost.
kragen 10y ago
Every hobbyist printer can get down to fractions of a millimeter. I think 100μm surface roughness is typical.

Merad 10y ago

A few years ago in grad school I spent about a month designing a 3D printed case for a Raspberry Pi + Camera [0]. We used a Makergear M2 (a $2000 printer at the time). The process had some frustrating moments, but overall it was an amazing experience. 3D printers allow for a wonderful iterative design process. Come in in the morning, pull parts off of the printer, measure, test fit, etc. Tweak in CAD, or start working on the next part, and start printing your changes/additions before lunch. By mid afternoon the print is done, and you usually have time to do another round of changes that you can start printing before you leave for the day. Of course, this is all assuming that your printer is working continuously and that you're ok tossing a lot of filament from those test prints. My experience with the M2 was that typically I could get it dialed in and it would print great for 2-3 weeks before it started misbehaving. Sometimes it was a simple adjustment (re-level the bed, etc.), but most of the time there was no obvious indication of the problem, and I'd spend several frustrating days leveling, calibrating, cleaning, and generally tinkering until it started working consistently once again. There are also plenty of issues with the print quality and precision, but I've already written more than I intended, so I'll skip them. Needless to say, it was sufficient for our needs. IIRC, our final cost per case was $4 in material (PLA) with a print time of about 6 hours. It's a fascinating technology, and it's mind blowing how far it's come in the last decade. I'm not sure that the FFF/FDM style printers will ever get to the point where they're ready for use by the general public, but the overall technology is here to stay. I wouldn't be surprised to see 3D printers become as common as microwaves in my lifetime. [0]: http://i.imgur.com/JkF1WQ4.jpg http://i.imgur.com/JkF1WQ4.jpg

huuu 10y ago

If his conclusion were true companies like Shapeways would only use cheap hobby printers. But ofcourse it is not. Reliability, support, accuracy, all lacking with hobby printers.

onion2k 10y ago
If his conclusion were true companies like Shapeways would only use cheap hobby printers. But ofcourse it is not. It's far from a perfect analogy, but with servers Google demonstrated really well that the cost of high-end 'professional' equipment can be a waste of money where cheap, commodity kit can be used at scale instead. It's not completely unreasonable to think that a farm of cheap 3D printers could be used in place of one high-end model eventually.
- baq 10y ago
  the difference in 3d printers and servers is rather hard to compare: different servers can compute the same result, faster, slower, but it'll be the same. not exactly true with 3d printers, where a result isn't binary.
  - dpark 10y ago
    Servers aren't actually binary, either. Your cheap server might serve the same result (binary), but performance might degrade under load more rapidly (nonbinary), the failure rate might be be higher (nonbinary), and the support for cheap hardware might be nonexistent (nonbinary). There's also the issue of SKU drift/mix as your cheap hardware fails and gets replaced with a different/newer SKU (adds maintenance cost, is also nonbinary). At the end of the day, the cost difference plus the ability to mitigate/hide the problems via software makes the commodity hardware the winning option, but it's not just a matter of "same bits come out; good enough". Commodity hardware is also not really cheap. These are 1U/2U servers that cost thousands of dollars. These are cheap relative to mainframes, but they're not consumer devices.
- timlyo 10y ago
  The difference here is reliability. Commodity kit is generally reliable, just slower; whereas cheap 3d printers are more likely to fail a print/produce junk.

rebootthesystem 10y ago

It would have been nicer to have seen a comparison using the same material as well as a series of parts designed to test for specific issues in 3D printing. Add to this printing 100 copies of each part and we might have ended up with a useful set of data points.

throwaway_exer 10y ago
"It would have been nicer if you ran an experiment to assuage my personal interest, but I didn't write you a check for $50,000 to do so." FTFY.

tsomctl 10y ago

No mention at all of the strength/rigidity/hardness of the jigs. The professionally printed one was made from ABS, which is a harder plastic than HIPS. It is also possible that the professional machine bonds the plastic filament to the workpiece better. The best way to test this would be destructively. Of course, if the jig is just going to be used for a short period of time, structural integrity doesn't matter. And the hobbyist machines are just going to get better as technology improves.

saidajigumi 10y ago
Also missing from the discussion are tolerances. If the Stratasys is able to print meeting high significantly higher design tolerances, that alone could justify the price tag. Certainly in other areas of manufacturing, adding zeros to the accuracy/repeatability of a system often adds zeros directly to the price tag. If you can get a print hot off the printer and immediately say "LGTM" without further ado, that may just mean your application isn't very demanding.
- Domenic_S 10y ago
  Underrated comment here. The same exact part can cost $20 or $2,000 to produce depending on tolerances!

Animats 10y ago

From the article: "One defect I observed on the Lulzbot printed part was the blade portion of the tool had a split in it from not bonding correctly. This was most likely a cause of pushing the 0.5mm nozzle to its limits in terms of layer height but a little glue and some pressure would fix this split no problem." Er, that's called a "reject" in manufacturing. This is the basic problem with low-end filament-type 3D printers - weak layer bonding. You're welding a hot thing to a cold thing, which never works well. And there's considerable thermal expansion, and thus shrinkage, in the material, which produces internal stresses between layers. That's where things crack.

patcheudor 10y ago
"This is the basic problem with low-end filament-type 3D printers - weak layer bonding. You're welding a hot thing to a cold thing, which never works well." Bonding always works well for me and many others. The author of this story choose to use a material (HIPS) which really should still be considered experimental for most FDM printers. I've personally never had a lot of luck with it and instead choose to use either PLA or ABS with a heated chamber & with those two materials can build very strong parts with no boding problems whatsoever. Here's an example of a violin I've recently printed: https://www.flickr.com/photos/patcheudor/26263996272/in/dateposted-public/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/patcheudor/26263996272/in/date... Note that I've now printed five violins and in the 100's of hours it has taken to do so not had a single failed print even when printing thin (typically .40 mm) shells.
- Animats 10y ago
  Thin is the good case. It's thick parts that have problems. At TechShop, things seem to crack around 2cm-3cm thickness.
  - patcheudor 10y ago
    I routinely do thick 100% fill parts in ABS with no issues.
stcredzero 10y ago

ChuckMcM 10y ago

I enjoyed this article, but perhaps not for the reasons the author hoped. This quote, "With some tweaks to my G code and use of a nozzle that is more suited for higher resolution prints I am confident that I could produce a part that would be very close to the quality of the Stratasys produced part." really summed it up. It sums to "I can tweak my setup and get this part to be good enough relative to the expensive machine." and that is great. What is missing is it is every friggin' part. Seriously, all of the $2,000 printers have quirks that hit based on part geometry, especially in ABS. Part too long? need to add hold down tabs to prevent warping. Too many overhangs? extra supports. Too long a tool travel? Up the hotend temperature so that the extruded material doesn't cool down to much. You can make great parts but every machine is different, and every part you make has a slightly different requirements. "Real" manufacturing tools are all about the repeatability and setup. Pretty much any machining center can take a gcode file, look at it, and adjust itself to make the best possible rendition, or warn you if it can't do so and meet its advertised tolerances. A hobby machine you print it, you tweak the parameters, you print it again, maybe you tweak the gcode a bit, and finally you print a really nice part. What gets you repeatability? measuring. There are so many things that you can measure and hobby machines don't. Who puts glass slides (accurate to a tenth of a micron) providing position feedback on the x, y, and z stages on a hobby machine? Nobody, the slides and readers cost $1K just by themselves. There has been some motion toward monitoring the feed of the filament to give a "stripped filament" warning, but who measures the actual flow? the temperature of the melt chamber and feed path? I really enjoy my 3D printer, I'm printing out a damper for a meat smoker as I write this, its going to be glorious, but its also the 3rd time I've printed this particular part to tune it up. We'll see how it works on the smoker.

baq 10y ago
i haven't ever used or owned a 3d printer and this part >This quote, "With some tweaks to my G code and use of a nozzle that is more suited for higher resolution prints I am confident that I could produce a part that would be very close to the quality of the Stratasys produced part." really summed it up. It sums to "I can tweak my setup and get this part to be good enough relative to the expensive machine." and that is great. What is missing is it is every friggin' part. is sooo true regardless of discipline. /rant on sure, you can make vim/emacs/sublime or macos/linux/windows behave just like you want, but you have to do this on every box you ever touch (disclaimer: i use vim). as i get older, the more i want my tools to just work, without tweaking for hours that requires deep knowledge about the system i'm customizing, to the point of willing to pay money to get the customizing part done for me. in this case, the $200k machine most likely isn't used by a single person who knows everything about its quirks, so it's all the more important for it to work correctly without tweaking, on the first try. i wish more software was like that. /rant off

taitems 10y ago

Surely the high gloss finish on the black material is drawing attention to a lot of the flaws as well? I'd really like to see a same colour comparison between the two.

dbrgn 10y ago

Using different material and different infill is a bit of an unfair comparison. Using 100% infill causes more problems with warping due to shrinkage, thus increasing the difficulty. Using 25% avoids this, but decreases stability a bit. Regarding the print quality in general, I think an Ultimaker 2+ would give you better results (also at a price of 2500$).

dbrgn 10y ago

Here's another interesting comparison: $20,000 vs $600: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/3DPrinterShootout600PrintrbotVs20000UPrintSEPlus.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/3DPrinterShootout600PrintrbotV...

willvarfar 10y ago

I have never seen a 3D printer, although I have seen a model (of a house plan) made with a 3D printer. You folks who live near civilization and 'make' communities are so lucky! :) Are there any 3D printers that integrate a milling machine? I imagine a machine that prints the model slightly oversize, milling and then perhaps finally warming the surface to polish it, all as it goes... I would love to have access to a hobby 3D printer as I have this idea that won't die about making a cylindrical version of the Enigma http://wiki.franklinheath.co.uk/index.php/Enigma/Paper_Enigma http://wiki.franklinheath.co.uk/index.php/Enigma/Paper_Enigm... with glowire or alternatively tracks for ball bearings, as a cheap present people can buy at, say, Bletchley Park gift shop. Silly thing to get fixated on.

jacquesm 10y ago
> Are there any 3D printers that integrate a milling machine? No, and there likely never will be. Why would you wait for hours to then still have to mill down your final product when all the advantages of 3D printing are then lost and all the advantages of milling are lost? The advantages of 3D printing are that as an additive process it will work in many environments where a subtractive process would not, the advantages of milling are that - as a substractive process - it can make a final result that is substantially stronger than most of the things you could do with a 3D printer and that it most likely is much faster. Re-working or finishing like that is typically reserved for casting and other cheap mass production processes.
- ansgri 10y ago
  Actually, there is: http://us.dmgmori.com/products/lasertec/lasertec-additivemanufacturing/lasertec-65-3d http://us.dmgmori.com/products/lasertec/lasertec-additiveman... "By combining both, additive manufacturing via powder nozzle and the traditional cutting method in one machine, totally new applications and geometries are possible."
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Wow. Thank you for proving me wrong and finding that. > totally new applications and geometries are possible It'd be nice to have some concrete examples of those.

blahi 10y ago

This seems like an interesting hobby. How much time is needed to achieve a reasonably high understanding of this work? Not industrial grade expert, but a knowledgeable layman. And where/how can I educate myself?

armamut 10y ago
I'm not even an engineer, and I have made one. But, making a 3D printer by yourself from ground up (or assembling one with the parts bought from china etc.) takes a lot of time. I only paid attention at my spare times, so it took my months. But I must say that, it is a very satisfying hobby. I strongly recommend it :) But if you want to buy one, you can find very nice 3D printers at $250 - $300 range from aliexpress etc. It may take hours, a day or a week for calibration (depending on your printer model and printed part quality expectations), and you are good to go. But I must say that, 3D printers need maintenance and that can take your time as well. If you want to educate yourself, http://reprap.org/ http://reprap.org/ is the site you would want to visit. Not only for making your own printer, but calibrating and maintaining a bought 3D printer as well...
- blahi 10y ago
  No, I meant using a 3d printer to build cool stuff.
  - mlni 10y ago
    As a start you can just go to Thingiverse to search for a model that fills your need and send it to the printer. That would take you all of a couple of minutes. Per try, until it comes out ok. If you want to try your hand at 3d modelling then you'll probably download Sketchup as a start and noodle around while watching youtube tutorials on the side. In about 8h you'll feel confident enough to actually model something meaningful. After ~40h you'll be able to knock together a model quite proficiently. After you'll have gotten tired of Skethub producing broken STLs and not allowing you to change your mind after modelling a thing, you'd move on to one of the real CAD software package, like Solidworks or Fusion 360 (which is great for beginners, btw). That rabbithole goes exactly as deep as you've got time for :) Fiddling with the printing itself will take a bit of setup time before each print and then a lengthy wait (hours to days) to get the result, or see it fail in some new and unfunny way. It's not really all that difficult, to be honest, just takes some time to develop an intuition about what's likely to fail.

lawless123 10y ago

The difference between food at a good restaurant and a great restaurant isn't huge. The price however usually is.

rnestler 10y ago

What's also important when comparing 3D printers is maintenance cost and effort. For example: The Ultimaker 2 we have in our Hackerspace needs regular replacement (about every 600 printing hours) of the PTFE Coupler (hot end part). Also sometimes you need to perform a cold pull (https://ultimaker.com/en/resources/19510-how-to-apply-atomic-method https://ultimaker.com/en/resources/19510-how-to-apply-atomic...) if the nozzle is clogged.

GnarfGnarf 10y ago

3D printing, especially hobbyist machines, is still in its infancy and produces disappointing results. A large flat piece warps. The resolution is coarse. It takes too long to produce even a simple piece. The machine needs constant monitoring. It's at the equivalent of the DOS stage of personal computing. I wrote code to produce STL files. These files are accepted by hobbyist printers. I sent it to a professional shop, they complained one of my triangles wasn't closed, couldn't fix it or tell me which it was. Wonderful.

MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
You probably knew this one, but still: http://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com/post/113272014704/sure-we-have-a-3d-printer http://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com/post/113272014704/sure...
- GnarfGnarf 10y ago
  That looks so sad :o(

3dprinted 10y ago

Neat project comparing FDM. Now, let's be a little more fair and start looking at what production companies will be buying: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/printers/3d-printers.html http://www8.hp.com/us/en/printers/3d-printers.html http://www.stratasys.com/3d-printers/production-series http://www.stratasys.com/3d-printers/production-series No contest. Having multiple hundreds of thousands of colors, properties (like heat-resistance, flexibility, different opacity), various different materials, automated easily removable supports, decent precision, and serious speed beats the shit out of your desktop model any day of the week. Sorry.

LELISOSKA 10y ago

aren't resin printers increments better than normal 3d printers?

ZenoArrow 10y ago
Yes, SLA printers like the Form 2 do offer better print resolutions than FDM printers of a similar price. http://formlabs.com/products/3d-printers/form-2/ http://formlabs.com/products/3d-printers/form-2/ The downside is they can't work with as wide a range of materials compared to FDM printers, and the materials they can work with tend to be more expensive.

globuous 10y ago

I'd like to see a similar post ten years from now, see how things have evolved. I didn't realise how precise some of these industrial 3D printers were! This gives me a lot of hope as to what I might have in my house in a decade.

JabavuAdams 10y ago

What a weird article! The low-cost part is as good as the high-cost part ... except in all of these ways that it's not, that I will outline here. Oh, and I basically just eyeballed them, instead of measuring them. Oh, when pieces were missing due to failure to print, I just kind of assume that they would have printed okay with some tweaks. What!? Amusing.

Certified 10y ago

"The Stratasys printed part was printed with ABS material, 100% infill with a standard layer height on normal detail settings. Not having direct access to the machine I was not able to extract any real nitty gritty details on the overall print set up. For the Lulzbot print that I created I used HIPS material with a 0.5mm nozzle, 0.1mm layer height, 25% infill, 4 top and bottom solid layers, 45 mm/s print speed with standard acceleration, 240C extrusion temperature, 110C bed temperature, and an extrusion width of 0.6mm." This is an apple to oranges comparison. I work with a Lulzbot 5, a Lulzbot Mini, a Stratasys dimension elite, and two polyprinters on a daily basis and have been working with 3D printers for over 10 years as part of my job. Why was a material like HIPS ever used for comparison with ABS if both machines can print with ABS? Why was the extrusion width 0.6mm on a 0.5mm nozzle? Why is he comparing a 100% fill print with a 25% fill print? Why didn't he mention that the Lulzbot Taz 5 he was using has a $500 print head upgrade to let it print soluble support material as well? This whole article just reeks of either someone who is either very new and inexperienced to Hobby 3D printers or was intentionally trying to make the TAZ 5 look bad. I have done similar comparison studies myself and have come to drastically different conclusions. We sold the dimension elite a while ago.

Guthur 10y ago
I'm not familiar with the tech but having read the article I feel he was very positive about the TAZ 5 and so doubt he was going out of his way to make it look bad.
avs733 10y ago
I had some of the same questions...my suspicion is basically two fold 1) the infill change may have been intended to make the print times comparable (he suggested both were about 18 hrs) 2) He may have been attempting to compare the default (or default-ish) settings of each machine
- MikeAPD 10y ago
  Hi, I wrote this article. To answer your suspicions. 1) Realistically they are within an hour of each other regardless of infill so the total print time was negligible in this experiment. A few changes on both machines could make either or print much faster. 2) Yes, it was my intention to have the same layer heights and overall print settings as close to each other as I could.

spriggan3 10y ago

3D Printing is really great for industrial designers who want to prototype products. My uncle is an industrial designer and I remember how costly it used to be for him to come up with a simple prototype. Today a $2500 printer can get one pretty far in a few hours, trully revolutionary. It gives a greater margin for experimentation, trial and error.

MikeAPD 10y ago

Hi, I wrote the article. I am really enjoying the comments everyone has contributed. One major detail I left out was the amount of failed parts that came out of the professional machine prior to getting a good one. I was unaware of the reject rate at the time I wrote this. In addition, the production tool ended up having resin added and then sanded to cover up some of the imperfections on the "professional" print.

kragen 10y ago
What was the reject rate? Also, some of us have asked some other questions about tolerances and material properties in other comments on here; could you answer them? I'm sorry about the somewhat intemperate comments of some of the other commenters.
- MikeAPD 10y ago
  I can't give you an exact reject rate but it went through at least 3 iterations before being acceptable. As for tolerances and material properties (overall strength of the part) the Stratasys machine is superior in both aspects. As I mentioned in the conclusion of the article, I would like to do more experiments on the parts including dimensional analysis and possibly a tensile or compression test. Having 1 data point (1 tool from each machine) wouldn't be the best results for an accurate comparison but I would still be interested in the results.

dekhn 10y ago

I see cheap 3D printers like I saw linux in 1995: not quite the functional equivalent of a $100K SGI workstation, but still a great way to get experience in the area. You just have to understand that much of your time will be spent tuning the printer, and fixing it, and upgrading it. I don't know that the Statasys fails nearly as often as a cheap printer.

dekhn 10y ago

Be aware that the high end printers include features that are patented, for example soluble support, heated build chambers, etc, all have IP around them that may prevent companies selling inexpensive printers from including those features directly. This could translate to better results from the high end printers.

progman 10y ago

3d printer testers should use a default model with complex geometry which makes comparison much easier. For instance, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1019228 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1019228

kragen 10y ago

I read this whole article hoping to find the part where he tests the tensile strength, impact resistance, stiffness, and dimensional accuracy of the two parts. It never came. Except for the part where he had a delamination ("split"), which I guess means zero strength for that part of the part. I've been fairly disappointed with the strength of Prusa-Mendel-printed parts I've made. Even if you don't have complete delaminations, it's easy to get poor layer adhesion, which makes the parts fall apart under the least strain. You can fight that by turning up the temperature and filament feed rate, at the cost of dimensional accuracy (which you can compensate for in theory but I haven't done so successfully, being just an amateur) but the higher heat also weakens the PLA. Maybe this weakening is hydrolysis due to water absorption in the filament; I don't have a way to measure that, except printing the same thing a second time after dehydrating the filament, which I haven't done. I was surprised to find that 100% infill is not always the strongest option, even holding part geometry constant. Lower infill settings produce a more compliant part, and it can consequently withstand higher impact energies. I don't think you should hold part geometry constant when changing machines or especially entire fabrication technologies. You should play to the strengths of the machine you have. I know that's contrary to the outlook of 3D printing, but it's true. Things like topology optimization can easily generate forms that are impossible to injection-mold, relatively easy to FDM, and much stronger. If you have the option of 25% infill, you can probably get a stronger part by deploying the plastic you saved as ribs outside the main body. And so on.

crumpled 10y ago

"The Stratasys machine uses a separate dissolvable support material that can be washed away with a special salt water solution." This can be achieved with dual extruder models Makerbot 2X or its FlashForge clone, under $2500. Use HIPS as the support material, print in ABS and dissolve HIPS in d-limonene.

lunchTime42 10y ago

Additive manufacturing is bad from the getgo. Anything with errors, adding upon with errors, is unsuitable for large scale precision manufacturing.