I was experimenting with a new wireless lav mic in this video, but I wasn’t willing to commit to the new untested mic, so that’s why I’m wearing two lav mics. And while the cheap wireless lav mic I used is nice and portable, there was a lot of hiss and clipping in the recording which I maybe can fix with some fiddling, but I ended up going with the old sound source for now. See, it’s always a good idea to be careful with your sound.
The situation depicted in the first 2 minutes of this video was mostly true. That back-and-forth with Cymon was mostly in my head in reality, but for a while there I was trying to make an honest evaluation of 3 different 3D printers when more requests for reviews were coming in. The problem is I don’t ever want to say “no”. So I reached out to a group of my 3D printing buddies and fortunately Liam was willing to work with me on this. In the end, I think this worked out well.
I’ve been making more effort to do more story telling in my videos lately. But story telling sections need serious editing. Last week’s 1 minute of glitch video took 8 hours to edit. This video had more editing throughout, switching between Liam and me, but the first 2 minutes took 8 hours to get right, with multiple overlays and stuff. Whenever I plan a video, if something is going to take a lot of editing, I try to work it into the start of the video, so that it’s not wasted. And maybe those fancy edited sections will give people a reason to stick around longer than a few minutes into the video. It’s a lot of work, but I still feel like I’m living in the shadow of my hyper successful click-bait “Don’t buy the popular printers” video, and I owe people a good experience, when I’m not doing a thrown together Blender tutorial. I have a few more of those, but I do have some 3D printers yet to review.
I have to admit that the Longer LK1 set off more than a few alarm bells when I first checked it out. When you see a 3D printer as big as a CR-10, with a high quality UI, but costing as much as an Ender 3, it can make you scratch your head? My guess was it was either going to print like crap or it’s going to not print at all. Fortunately it only prints like crap, which is good because that means you’ll at least be able to use it for a while before going “Hmm, I should try to make this better”. And then you can make it better. But I would say that, counting the expense of your time, you might be better off paying a little more up front and getting a lot more 3D printer elsewhere. The design of the LK1 is inelegant and, unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done about it. You can only polish a turd so much, in the end it’s still a turd.
But the LK1’s low price, high build volume, and improved UI, along with being an editable UI, and only a few points docked for crap print quality give it a pretty impressive score on my “Price/Capability/Ease of Use” scale. I would say this printer delivers on it’s promises, and that’s really something.
