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I work in a lab that has a large variety of printers from hobby grade to Stratasys FDM and resin SLA, polyjet. You're right that the stratasys machines are uni

I work in a lab that has a large variety of printers from hobby grade to Stratasys FDM and resin SLA, polyjet. You're right that the stratasys machines are unimpressive in their quality and precision; I can get a better end part in many cases with a $300 Prusa clone than a $25k F370. However you're also right that their consistency is their main strength, and in my opinion this is why they are worth the money (if you need high throughput and low failure rate). The Stratasys printers we have are easily the most reliably machines we run, and have a close to 100% success rate while being completely hands off. The calibration routines, heated build chamber, and disposable build plates are key here. The other area where Stratasys leads is with soluble support. I haven't found any generic material that comes close to SR-30. PVA is an absolute nightmare for reliability. If anyone has found something that they are happy with, please let me know.

dogma1138 7y ago
You can probably find the same soluble support Stratsys uses the price is just going to be bonkers like all their materials. I just print with normal support structures but E3D soluble support is supposedly very good (but very expensive like $280 for 5 lbs.). So I’m not going to spend that much money I rather print something that would print with minimal supports and just cut them off. Yeah Stratsys doesn’t care about the final quality of your benchy but it will work every time and their integration along the entire toolchain is excellent including the design phase which means your CAD is going to be aware of the dimensionality impact of the printing as well as other constraints like support material placement.