With all that time spent on flashy LCD interfaces, cases to make it look like a consumer-ready device, and the stupid camera, I guess MBI ran out of time to do any engineering for the cartesian systems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJeYpTQb750
Beauty is more important than talent though, right?
flimsy…
They also went from 1kg spools to “large” which is 10% less filament, but they liked the original price so they kept that.
Well if that’s the best closed source can do its time to ask do their patents actually cover what they produce.
@Nigel_Dickinson The topic has come up and frankly I don’t think think their patents are worth shit. They are vague piece of crap patents that try to cover stuff that other people actually developed as far as I am concerned. I would compare them to Microsoft which I consider to be thieves and bullies who use time in court to bankrupt opponents while doing whatever they can to stifle, absorb or destroy the competition.
BTW, can you tell that both companies annoy me? 
Did the Makerbot’s product line benefit from Stratasys acquisition? Meaning, aside form the whole open source vs closed source controversy - has the Makerbot product line enhanced by Statasys’s technology?
Surprised?
@Minuk_Choi It gave them access to the heated chamber patent… which they’re only using on the Z18… which is PLA only…
heated chamber…PLA…what?
I am sorry, but does a heated chamber even make sense for a PLA printer?
@Whosa_whatsis I thought that was primarily for ABS, and of minimal use for PLA… I’m a little surprised there was not an explosion of different types such as SLA, delta, etc… At the very least, to have an answer to these alternate types
That’s right, heated chamber makes no sense for PLA.
I thought that tear down of the MK5 extruder was telling of their design problems/failures as the IM’d cover part has an entry point for filament they didn’t use in the end because the filament was prone to snapping (due to bend radius) - how the hell did they get to the point of getting parts IM’d before they realized this was a problem? They make rapid prototyping machines for fucks sake!
@Tim_Rastall Yeah, that’s gotta be embarrassing.
@Tim_Rastall I think I read the same tear down - it was strange… I thought maybe it was a future-proofing attempt for future filament?
I love the evil snickering at the end 
my $300 simple made out of plywood has way less slop then that.
@Minuk_Choi I think it’s more likely the industrial designers spent too much time making the bot look cool and not so much making sure it was efficiently designed from a mechanical perspective.
@Minuk_Choi imho MKI benefited only from the marketing power of Stratasys, not much of anything else. Seriously I do not think Stratasys has much real stuff to bring to the “low end” market beyond mass-production. Low cost FDM inventors just move faster than what they can sustain nowadays ( http://www.tridimake.com/2014/03/quick-comparison-pro-versus-low-cost.html )