Okay gang, more Chinese printers. These were taken today at the
China 3D Printer Expo. It's on until the 27th if anyone is in or near Shenzhen.
There were fewer Ultimaker clones and derivatives than I expected given how popular they are with the Chinese 3D printing community. Most of these are manufactured up near Shanghai and this expo has more Guangdong companies exhibiting, that could have played a role. "Ideaprinter" (
1, 2, 3,) was pitching a derivative that looked like it had some interesting changes to the original design. Nice resolution but the filament jam had gone unnoticed.
Flashforge (
1, 2, 3, ) was there along with countless Makerbot clones like
"Winbo" and their hilarious
Obama 3D Printer (That's a scan of the brochure, no Photoshop- it's really there).
I did not bother taking pictures of all the clones. I have little sympathy for Makerbot (aside from the usual reasons) since they decided to save a few pennies and outsource all their injection molded parts to China. This gives the design by far the lowest barriers to entry for a small, local company looking to make a quick buck by cloning a printer without investing in tooling. All they have to do is buy the
Replicator II source and they can get the
same custom parts from the same factory. This is why printers like the Flashforge are basically indistinguishable from the Replicator II.
The Romscraj guys were there from Singapore with their
M.O.B 3D Printer- really friendly, stopped for a chat. They also had a prototype of their Portabee Go (
1, 2 ) neat little portable printer, looks interesting.
Kysan had a Bukobot They were also advertising the Printrbot Simple (Beta version) and Printrbot Plus. These are the people who make the stepper motors on my Printrbot so I'm not sure if they are authorized importers or making clones.
Luckygold's
"3D Printer EZ" an Up! clone in a box. TONS of these on the market now, probably will be more- the printers just work.
Qubea, new brand on the market. Big glitzy booth, very fancy looking delta printer (
1, 2, )
Reprapper aka "Reprap Walmart". I've spoken to their GM Simon Zhou a bunch of times on QQ, they had some real problems with their earlier filaments which I think have been largely ironed out now. ]They were printing with their new
nylon but Simon was unhappy with the quality, seems committed to bringing new filaments to market. Unlike many other booths he actually had an awareness of what people wanted- was quick to give attribution to the printers he was selling. A metal Ultimaker (
1, 2, ), and yet more Up! Clones (
1, 2, 3 ).
Saw two promising looking SLA printers. The
TF3 and the
Cophoda.
I had seen marketing material for the Zbot before- but at the time it looked like another case of build-one-and-fish-for-OEM. They had a large, professional booth, impressive lineup of all metal, progressively sized printers (
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 )
I spoke at length with the Zbot Sales Manager Mr. Hu- knew his stuff, knew the community, knew the product. I did not see the printers in action- and I am always suspicious of printers that can't run a demo full time. They have a very nice body scanner (
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ) - basically a polished version of the
OpenSkan 3D Body Scanner /
The Scan-O-Tron 3000 . I can't see investing in a Primesense/Kinect v1 based solution at this point with the TOF based Kinect v2 SDK already being sent out to developers. Anyway, if Zbot's products actually work as nice as they look they will be a company to keep an eye on.
The full album is here and I have scanned all the brochures from the above companies, if anyone wants the PDFs just shoot me a PM.
