This was a Christmas present for my husband, but it has been a lot of fun for both of us. The quality of the prints is very good, definitely good enough for small things and sturdy enough to give most things to our toddler. I’m glad we waiting a couple years for the technology to mature, but this printer is pretty user friendly. The setup for the printer once we received it was pretty simple. The only things that needed tweaking from shipping were the platform leveling, and entering the values from the included calibration print file after we printed it. So far most of what we’ve done is print other peoples’ designs from Thingiverse, but we also make some cool stuff in SketchUp. You need a free plugin to export the files from sketchup to the afinia software, and I had to check the “unsolid model” in print preference so it didn’t do weird things with overlaps, but overall it wasn’t too hard. If I could add one feature, it would be a bigger build platform, but the flip side is that it’s a pretty small thing to fit on your desk, which is nice. Dualstrusion (to print in two colors a once) and faster production would be nice, but not a must have. The lack of an integrated display is no biggie for us, since we just leave it cabled to the computer and get the status from the software.
Reviewed by: Ellen Weaver from Denver, CO. on 1/10/2013
3D Printer for Home, Education and Rapid Prototyping