3ddder wrote:I read that the filament is really only 300g because when they say 600g, they're meaning with the holder and everything. That is literally 1/4 what you can get at the same price anywhere else. Is that really true? I can understand paying more, but 4 times. wow.
Ok, this will involve some math so bear with me.
You can only find this out if you have a full XYZ cartridge and and empty but since I did, I did this experiment. XYZ as well as everyone else sells filament by weight and not by the meter. The cartridge tracks by the meter and not by weight because the meters left matters and the weight is not a "direct" measure of when the cartridge would run out.
On a XYZ cartridge, one meter of filament weighs 2.5 grams. 2.5 times 240 meter equals the 600 grams that is on a normal retail Da Vinci cartridge (*approx). Now you can compare that against other places that will tell you the meters per kilo for their filament. For instance 400 meters of 1.75mm ABS from Toybuilderlabs is 1 Kilo according to Toybuilders blog. This again comes out to the one meter equals 2.5 grams. If you don't have the empty and full cartridges and a digital scale to check this for yourself, you can still see the numbers Da Vinci is using for meters by checking cartridge info on the machines display.
I did this calculation on the Da Vinci cartridges so I'd be able to know how much was inside it even after using a resetter on the cartridge. Just multiply the net weight times .4 and you get the meters. Different makers of ABS will have slightly different weight per cm3 but most will be close to the numbers I'm calculating from.
The reason that the "industry" sells by weight instead of by meter is so no one can cheat on the numbers and get away with it. As you can guess a slight undersizing of filament would gain you meters while still weighing the same amount if it was sold that way. When sold purely by weight, you can compare the pricing of 3mm versus 1.75mm filament (different sizes) and even filament of different material (ABS, PLA, Nylon, Ninjaflex and so forth) and be able to simply know which is "cheaper" in an apples to apples comparison. You may have seen this type of comparison used if you've ever shopped in a Walmart grocery aisle and saw the "price per unit" amount for items of the same type like a frozen pizza.
This does allow me to make a direct comparison of the pricing of say XYZ filament and Octave as sold by Amazon. Da Vinci is $28 for 600 grams and Octave is $31 for 1000 grams. So in a direct comparison, the Da Vinci cartridge would cost $46.67 if it held that same 1000 grams. This isn't 4 times the cost of a competitor, but a solid price difference. Compared against the price of say Solidoodle filament (also as found at Amazon) it's not so bad. If the Solidoodle filament was also 1 kg, it would cost $47.40 which is the same pricing level Da Vinci is using.