Why Solidoodle got the feature mix right…

May 23, 2013 No Comments by Jonathan Tustain

3D printing enthusiast Andrew walker shares his thoughts on the $500 Solidoodle 3 (now on sale in the UK).

Solidoodle may not be the name that is top of your 3D printer list. You’re probably aware of Makerbot because they’re the brand with the biggest PR machine and they’ve got the ‘Replicator’ which conjures up the obvious Star Trek connection. But have you stopped to think about the sheer scale of the engineering and sales challenge presented to these companies? It’s daunting and the history of consumer tech is filled with examples of how bigger and better, isn’t always actually better. It’s a question of perspective.

As products, 3D printers are a bit like home computers from the early 1980s, meaning there’s a fair amount of fiddling about to produce something that’s a bit low-fi compared with the stuff we’re used to from big industrial processes. This creates a dilemma for the early mover companies in the home 3DP hardware market – sure, you’ve got to be in it to win it, but how do you navigate consumer expectations without becoming a bit of a let down and killing demand? It takes more than a snappy name. It means making some well judged decisions, not about what innovations to build into the product, but what to leave out to keep the costs down in a confusing price vs. Feature balancing act. After getting up close and personal with a few home 3D printers, I think the Solidoodle approach has got the balance right.

In many ways it’s a word of mouth marketing problem. Think about the first time you saw a home computer. The reason why there’s a more people who knew someone with a Commodore 64 in 1983 than actually owned one was because of the negative buzz. The mags and TV shows said they were super cool, so you thought they were super cool. Then you finally get to use one and, after an hour of anxiously clicking the switches on a mechanical tape deck, realised that even when they work properly, they’re not nearly as good as the Galaxians machine in the local arcade. Once a handful of kids at school had got a ’64, many of their formerly enthusiastic friends decided to wait a bit until something better came along.

It’s a dynamic that killed off many early home computers and it could well do the same for many of the current 3D printer brands too. It’s an effect of the phenomenon marketeers call ‘post-purchase dissonance’. It’s the product equivalent of the first time you slap on some aftershave to discover that, rather than becoming irresistible to the girls at the disco, you’ve got a stingy rash and smell like toilet cleaner.

There’s a few 3DP printer brands out there and more appearing daily. From DIY kits for around £600 through to fully assembled multi-colour printers upwards of £3000 using a variety of OEM supplied materials from ABS plastic filament to resin – which all adds to the cost. How much you spend won’t automatically mean better results and even the best results won’t have the fine tolerances you’d expect from cheap plastic stuff you can mass produce for pennies. Funky branding and slick packaging won’t shift units because the consumers aren’t high street shoppers, they’re mostly techies and geeks who pride themselves on being skeptical about marketing to the point of cynicism.

But maybe has Solidoodle got the formula right for these market conditions. They’ve created a product at the cheap end of the plug and play market. The CEO, Sam Cervantes comes from an aerospace engineering background and he’s applied that thinking to the 3D printer problem. Solidoodle focuses on what most people will want from a 3D printer – speed and reliability – and ditched the bells and whistles. The build area isn’t the biggest, but it’s workable for most prototyping tasks. It needs to be connected to a PC to run, which means there’s fewer onboard electronics which keeps the price down. It’s a machine that makes no attempt to push the envelope, Cervantes’ team has focused on delivering something that’s just trying hard to be useful.

It’s a refreshing approach. Solidoodle’s latest model is about £700 in the UK, which is good value compared with the similar UP! Mini at around £900 or the Makerbot Replicator 2 at nearer three times the price. That’s not to say it’s a better machine, it can’t boast the onboard display systems, larger build volumes or higher resolutions of its more expensive competitors, but that’s why it’s a very well judged offering. By keeping the feature set limited, Solidoodle has kept a price advantage and asks customers to accept the fact it looks like it belongs in a factory more than an trendy design studio.

It also doesn’t attempt to get into the pointless bragging about resolution and build volume of it’s competitors. It doesn’t matter which type of printer you buy, none of them build anything much bigger than a loaf of bread anyway, so their real world usage is often limited to objects that are small or can be produced in modular assemblies, both of which you could produce on the Solidoodle platform almost as well as the bigger alternatives.

The same goes for resolution, which is fairly lacklustre on the Solidoodle at 300 microns. The marketing guys for most 3DP manufacturers are touting ever smaller numbers, such as Makerbot’s headline “100 microns” resolution, but in reality, anything larger than 20 microns looks and feels like fine spaghetti, in fact, even at 1 micron resolution objects have rough texture like unglazed ceramic. There is no glossy smooth finish for 3D printers, full stop. So if you’re working on a prototype, especially if it’s a scaled-down model or a modular assembly, 300 microns is close enough to validate the prototype. To put it another way, if you can live with ‘quite lumpy’ as opposed to ‘just a bit lumpy’ you’ll be happy with 300 microns resolution.

If you’ve got to have a home or workshop 3D printer you’re probably an early adopter, and early adopters put up with bugs, glitches, low resolutions and size restrictions. If you ever owned a 14.4 Kpbs modem or an Amiga, you’ll know what I mean. It comes with the territory, in the same way Twitter used to break all the time, Photoshop couldn’t save in GIF or Jpeg format, DTP programs used to chew-up Word documents into ASCII salad, web servers would crash if asked to serve more than 200Kb of data in one request, yada yada yada. For that kind of consumer, the feature:price ratio of a Solidoodle shows great business judgement. I might even get one myself… but I’ll probably wait for the next version.

Andrew Walker is a Chief Plastician and runs the blogUniquePlastique.com. Follow him at @uniqueplastique and visit hisnew 3D print shop.

FREE WEEKLY 3D NEWS BULLETIN –