Bre Pettis from MakerBot Industries reveals their latest product offering, The Replicator!
The MakerBot Replicator is the ultimate personal 3D printer, with dual extrusion (2-color printing)–and a bigger printing footprint, giving you the superpower to print things BIG! Assembled in Brooklyn by skilled technicians, the MakerBot Replicator™ is ready within minutes to start printing right out of the box.
Personalized manufacturing using a MakerBot Replicator opens up a world of innovation, customization and creativity. Create your own 3D designs or download one of the thousands of models from Thingiverse.com, and turn your ideas into real, physical objects.
Tech specs include a build envelope measuring 225 x145 x150 milimeters or 8.9 x 5.7 x 5.9 inches, a standard LCD panel and video-game-style control pad, providing for the display of build statistics and monitoring information and full control of the machine without the use of a computer. Models can be loaded directly from the SD Card slot and builds can be started directly from the control pad. Printing media can be either spooled ABS or PLA, diameter 1.75 millimeters.
The Replicator is fully assembled and tested prior to shipment. List price is $1,749.00 (add $250 for the dual extrusion model.)
Check out The Replicator’s webpage for all the details.
I am in the market for a sub $2000 3D printer. So far I’m leaning towards the Ultimaker for it’s large build area and speed. It seems to have better specs than the Replicator. Anyone have any recommendations?
I vote for Ultimaker too. The bowden extruder on ultimaker is not that precise as this makerbot extruders and I’m not sure Erik has the dual option on the Ultimaker, but I really dislike the makerbot and replicator design so my vote goes to Ultimaker if you need speed and volume, on the other hand, dual extruder is a huge leap forward, I have a 75x75x75cm repstrap printer and I still mostly print really small stuff so volume is not always that important … replicator volume ain’t small at all… on the other hand the dual extruder allows you to use separate material for support and main object, and if you use PLA for support and ABS for object you can clean the PLA support in caustic soda hence achieving soluble support feature that will allow very complex models to be printed, models you can’t even begin to print with single extruder
Interesting point about the dual extruder. I thought it was only good for printing with multiple colours. What don’t you like about the makerbot?
“What don’t you like about the makerbot?”
I am sorry but I will keep that for myself. As a part of the reprap core team I have a different view at the whole picture so I look it all from some other perspective, with some other expectations then a regular / new reprap user. Replicator is GREAT DEVICE (just like the ultimaker is great device too!!) so the fact that I dislike makerbot should not in any way affect your decision what device to go with. As I mentioned, Ultimaker is faster and with bigger capacity but think carefully do you really need a big capacity. Also speed is pretty much irrelevant unless you are planning to sell some service printing stuff for other ppl, for your own usage if it takes a whole night or half night to print something – who cares. Replicator is way more precise then the Ultimaker and the dual extruder is a huge plus. I run dual extruder system for 2 years now and I can’t imagine myself going back to single extruder printing… bicolor printing is, for me, useles, but using separate extruder for support is a HUGE thing, especially after we figured out PLA can be dissolved in caustic soda.
These “open” 3D printer things are waaay too expensive. I’m tired of reverse-engineering these devices in terms of BOM cost to come to this conclusion. Why don’t these guys just get bought-out by Apple, and put an Apple “glowing logo” on it – then triple the price. Millions of Apple-Zombies will then buy it. This might be a good thing?? Probably not. Apple will lock-up all the “open-ness” about it, put an “i” in front of the name, then sue anyone that tries to do any enhancements. Sad state this 3D printer “revolution” is in.
How is this “too expensive” ?! These printers used to cost 100-200k$ before reprap. Reprap project alone dropped those prices to way more acceptable 15-50k$ range. Reprap / RepStrap devices are in the 1000-3000$ “assembled and tested” and 200-1000$ in kit (fully prepared kit with assembly manual) or 100-500$ in “make it yourself” variant … it’s just a matter of what you want, what you are able to do yourself and what do you expect as result. If you want a “no-thikering, just works” solution, 15k$ is the amount you need to pay for the machine that “just works”. Yes it’s expensive but that is the cost of “just works”. Then more you want to invest your “time and knowledge” the price goes down. You can build a repstrap for under 200$ if you invest time and knowledge. I made over 10 machines in past 2 years, more then half of them were below 200$ and you can’t say that’s expensive, but if you do not understand electronics, mechanics, thermodynamics, chemistry .. you either have to learn, or pay someone to get some of the things done for you…
Just to add one thing, Replicator with dual extruder is ~2000$, assembled and tested. Now, remember how much was the laser printer just 10 years ago… IIRC a shitty HP was between 1800 and 2500$ … give it time, we dropped the price from 80k entry level machine to 2k entry level machine, thats 40 TIMES lower price in under 10 years … give it another few and I’m sure we’ll be having “just work” machines for under 1000$
Wish I could afford something like that.. maybe later.. but I will get one someday Im sure.. nice work guys..