No one can say i didn’t give this 3D printer a fair shake. I may have even given it more credit than it was due. I smiled through a review of a machine that I knew wasn’t as good as it should have been and ignored obvious flaws, all in an attempt to promote a technology that didn’t deserve it.
I still think post-extrusion full color 3D printing could work. In fact this particular iteration wouldn’t even be that big a deal to fox. For instance, the filament is transparent, leading to a strange gray base. But I discovered that if a thin print were painted with opaque white (I used nail polish) The clear looked white, and the colors really popped. So, if we had 3 heads, not just 2. (And if we want to implement the conductive filament option with this, 4 heads), one for the inkjets, one for the color accepting plastic, and one for white PLA. Then you do the outermost shell in the color accepting filament, do an inner shell in white, and voila, this thing would be making color that would rival high end machines. This wouldn’t work for very thin shelled items that only have room for the outer shell, but generally it would produce excellent results.
What I didn’t say in this review, or rather what I did say but edited out, was the real reason this printer ultimately failed. The biggest problem with this technology was not it’s obvious design flaws, but it’s parent company. XYZPrinting managed to lose the support of Barnaclese, it lost the support of Joel Telling, and now, despite holding on with white knuckles. the managed ti shake me.
I don’t believe that the problem with XYZPrinting is that they’re close source or chip their filaments or anything like that. No, I think the problem goes even deeper, to a core philosophy that drives everything they do. This is the part I cut out in editing, because I didn’t want to have out there, spoken with my voice. But it’s a point that is killing XYZPrinting and one that, quite frankly, I believe they deserve to die for. The core philosophy of XYZPrinting is this: The customer is always stupid. There’s a fine line between believe that customer needs a streamlined experience and thinking that they’re a hopeless idiot, and XYZPrinting crosses that line in everything they do. The customer is always stupid, so don’t partner with them to make things better. The customer is always stupid so put chips on your filament and materials and cut them off before they ruin the print. The customer is always stupid so trust the chips over the customer’s judgement. The customer is always stupid so don’t let them buy filament anywhere else, they’ll just buy the wrong one.
The problem with believing that the customer is always stupid is that it can very easily be hidden behind “We’re trying to make a streamlined experience for everyone”. If you believe that the customer is a partner with you, you want to build a streamlined experience so that they will have the experience of success. It’s a long game. You’re bringing in someone inexperienced, but scaffolding their experience so that later they’ll be able to return back to you with their own successes. But if you believe that they’re stupid, you’re just trying to part a fool and their money. And the difference can be as subtle as “Error: Ink is out” or “Warning: Ink is out, are you sure you want to continue”. And, yes, XYZPrinting’s errors used to be warnings and people took advantage of that to print with filament that they didn’t buy from XYZPrinting. Of course they did. Was that enough of a justification to switch to not trusting your customers? Has that helped them i the long run?
XYZPrinting recently negotiated a series of videos with me teaching people how to make full color 3D models. I told them all they needed to do was keep me printing and I would make those videos. And they couldn’t do that.
