XYZ Printing DaVinci 1.0 $499 7.8" cubed (Page 1 of 6)

actually.. its 300g of filament a cartridge... 600g's *total* weight of the cartridge, and 900g's Shipping weight (inc packaging).

So you're paying $25 for what you can buy for $10 through 'normal' filament suppliers... .... InkJet business model anyone ???  Or put it another way, buy a 1kg spool from octave for $31, which gives you 3.3 times the filament !

So clearly, you can subsidize a printer a hell of a lot when you force consumers to use a proprietary cartridge system that runs 3.3x the cost of standard 'quality' filament...

Exactly the same way you get to 'purchase' a $50 inkjet printer these days

Non-plussed entirely by this, but if grubby business models are the thing, can I interest you in this $400 printer here... as a plus - in order for me to ensure you get the best possible print quality and filament; I mean its a service to you the consumer for your protection! - you just have to buy all your filament from me, and I charge 3.3 times the going rate of ABS

I love it when people like to pretend they aren't blatantly advertising a printer of theirs by saying they 'saw' it.

Sorry to disappoint. Love my SD2. No relation to said company.

No problem. Just looking at the price for the parts seemed like a good exercise. But, we do not have any details yet on what parts may be sub-par to what we know with SD. -- ggunners

FYI. An unboxing of the printer here.

Things to note. Very much like a Solidoodle 3/4.

The reviewer was able to decode the "native" file format for the gcode files and offers a tool for encoding and decoding the files.

Auto-bed leveling did not work out of the box.

The reviewer used a regular spool of ABS and it worked fine. Also, the reviewer believes that Slic3r is being used under the covers.

-- ggunners

Available on Amazon.com now, XYZPrinting Da Vinci 1.0.

We've now heard confirmation that there is 600 grams of filament in their cartridges selling at $28. Others have said the chip inside the cartridge keeps track of the filament used and will show empty afterwards.

The premium for using XYZ filament is $28/600g vs. $31/1000g (Octave) or $0.0467/g vs $0.0310/g.

Or for 1kg pricing XYZ $46.70 vs Octave $31.00. That's $15.7/$31.0 or a 50.6% premium.

Whether there is value worth the premium depends on the implementation. If I do not have to calibrate the printer for each filament change and I will never have the filament come off the spool, there is a value to me for those capabilities, but it is probably more like 30% vs 50%.

Irreguardless, my SD2 will soon have a friend. -- ggunners

P.S. Printer received today, so they are shipping.

You could get 72 pounds of cartridges and a brand new Da Vinci printer for the cost of a Replicator 2 (4th gen).  That's a lot of filament! Most users will never go through that much, at least not for many years.

How to bypass the XYZ Da Vinci cartridge.  You still need a cartridge in place but you can use whatever filament you want, and the cartridge won't countdown to empty.

On the Da Vinci it has 3 samples, and one is called "DEMO". This one does not count against your filament count.

So to use this you need access to  the printer's onboard SD card. The printer takes a simple star screwdriver so you can open the back, or better yet cut a hole in the plastic right above the power button for quick access anytime.

Steps:
1. Load stl file in XYZware.
2. Press print
3. Once the file has transferred over to the printer, turn the printer off.
4. Take out sd card and pop it into computer.
5. Using notepad++ on windows, open offlineprinting.gcode and Sample01.gcode
6. Save offlineprinting.gcode as Sample01.gcode and save, overwriting the Sample01.gcode file
7. Disconnect printer from computer
8. Put sd card back in printer and turn on
9. Navigate to Utilitilites>Sample>Demo
10.Confirm to build print
11. Your item will print
12. You can check to make sure you did it right by going to Info>Cartridge Stats>Filament Count. You should notice that the number doesn't change

Other things to note:

This printer just uses gcode so you could theoretically use Cura or another slicing software to run the printer, but as of right now you still have to use the above method to get it to actually run the gcode. I have sliced and printed a model using Cura, but the results need tweaking at this point.

To use pla or other filament you need to change some of the gcode so you have the right temperature settings.  This can be done in a text editor or just change it with cura or whatever before generating the file.

The cartridges are reasonably priced. You get 600 grams for $28, and free shipping off Amazon. In comparison, 1000 grams from Makerbot costs $48 on Amazon. For $8 more you get 1200 grams of XYZ filament. Cost looks nearly the same to me. So why waste so much time tripping over pennies when XYZ has such a great user experience.  I wish XYZ had this printer a few years ago, I would be in heaven!

I Can't Wait To Hear Your Guys Review Of This Printer.

Have you updated the firmware?  It either works with the firmware update or it is because I also deleted a section of code in the firmware that may be doing it.  I did several things, so... I didn't know if it was a combo of deleting some firmware or just the fact of printing the file from the demo. I actually came across the glitch after trying other things.

If you haven't upgraded open up the firmware in notepad++.  It's a bunch of garble, but there is some unencrypted commented code that has to deal with the eeprom. Don't worry if you screw up, you can delete the firmware update off the sd card and it will revert to the default firmware. Delete lines 3659 to 3719 and lines 3741 to 3766.  If you don't want to tinker, I will do some more testing as I get time.  I've got mine working, but like I said, it was trying a whole bunch of different things, and by chance coming across a glitch, so I am not sure what exactly allows this glitch to work.

Ok thanks, just figured out the firmware update, did that, deleted those lines, and am trying to print again with a different model file following your previously mentioned process.

Oh and I also dremeled out a section to pop the SD card out as well.

i saw that as well, but it requires extra equipment I personally do not have. Renaming a file, if I can get that to work, would be much simpler and cheaper for now.

Thanks for the info. Looks like this could be a good time to start playing with Arduinos. I can have Amazon get one here by Sat for $17. Even if I get the other method working I'm slightly concerned about running the counter to 0 in my attempts to get it working, and I have a 1kg white and 1kg black spools here to play with.