Topic: Da Vinci 2.0 Duo Post Mortem: read this before you buy.
Hi folks,
I'm active on another forum, but I'd like to get this information out to as many people as I can. This details my nearly year-long experience with the Da Vinci 2.0 Duo 3D printer. The short version is: do not buy from that company.
Initially, I ordered the Da Vinci because it looked good and had great reviews. If you look at most of the reviews, they were written by people who had owned the printer less than a week, or who'd worked with it for only a handful of hours or days in order to write a review. I've had mine since December 2014, and officially gave up on it in late September 2015.
The print quality is fine, when it works its a sound piece of equipment. However, it suffers dramatically from hardware failures and a radically over-complicated design with many points of failure.
Let's start with calibration: Da Vinci's published method is to run a calibration routine, look at some numbers, and then **** around with dials on the bottom of the bed in no particular order, run the routine again, and see if the numbers are better. If you bug Da Vinci's tech support enough, they will eventually give you a PDF file that explains which dials affect what numbers, sort of, and that helps. One calibration run took me 30 hours. Another took 10. If you are building large models you will probably need to re-calibrate between every 2 or 3 prints. I am aware better calibration methods exist, but consider: the company who sells a product is the one responsible for making sure it works. You don't get to crowd-source that.
Software. I actually like XYZware. It doesn't putz around. Its so simple, it does all I wanted it to do. Import a model, set up rafts/supports, set quality, hit "Go" and you're done. It even had an option to automatically start printing after slicing, which I really liked. But it doesn't work; at one point I solved all my problems and got 2 uninterrupted weeks of printing simply by changing out the software for Simplify3D. I like it a lot more because it works, but XYZware's failing is more with the printer itself than with it's non-nonsense approach.
How about proprietary filament? Da Vinci is starting to branch out, but for a while they only did ABS in a few colors, in a proprietary cartridge. On the surface, this is a good idea - the cartridge reports back to the printer and the computer how much filament is left inside, so you never run out. I liked this feature a lot, until the chip in the cartridge turns out to be bad, and you waste an entire $30 unit because it kept failing to read back after 2 hours of printing. The cartridges also have about a 2 in 3 chance of jamming(I say this based on seeing it happen about 10 times over 15 cartridges - we'll get to that in a moment). Jammed cartridges can't be fixed. I bought mine through Amazon which advanced replaced them for me and even paid for return-shipping, but it still meant ordering 3 times as many cartridges as I thought I'd need and still frequently running out. There is also potential for damage to the printer if a cartridge jams, I think this was the cause of one of my major issues.
Now about hardware failures. There are MANY places where a single, cheap sensor can fail and make your entire printer unusable. Da Vinci offers no option to disable these printers and keep on trucking. From the cartridge, to the feeder, to the extruder, down to the bed, there are about 7 different sensors that can break and ruin the entire machine. And by "ruin" I mean "cause the onboard software to cancel the print, because it got bad feedback from the sensor". The business-end is still fine, it just can't go because the thermocouple that reads back the temperature of the extruder has broken, and since it's soldered on to a PCB somewhere it can't be easily replaced.. Then there's the afore-mentioned cartridge jams, read errors, and general other flakiness. If the bed isn't perfectly level, the printer will cancel mid-print with no error message. By the time I gave up, mine was giving me filament jam errors instantly, Da Vinci's support thought it might be a failed sensor on the filament feeder. It was feeding fine.
Now let's talk about support! Its crap. I work in customer service myself and know what a good CS department looks like. It's not that Da Vinci's techs themselves are bad, rude, or uncaring, they're actually very polite and genuinely want to help. But they can't, because everything is proprietary and the device is effectively not "user serviceable". My first major issue with the Da Vinci was caused by corrupted firmware, it could have been solved by flashing and reloading, but they didn't have a way to let me do this at home. I had to send the printer to them.
And that is where the first huge red flag went up: I had to pay to ship the printer to them, so they could fix a software problem on it. They swore up and down that they would check the whole printer out and make sure it was in good shape before sending it back. When I got it back, it worked for maybe 1 week. Their solution? PAY to ship it to them AGAIN for a SECOND RMA. The unit had never worked without tinkering for more than a week at a time.
Then things got interesting. I bought Simplify3D(AMAZING software, please buy it) and it fixed the printer for maybe another 3 weeks. Several wasted man-days on calibration later(and weeks of lost printing time due to bad calibration). It finally failed again, and again they proposed another RMA. I asked for a refund or a replacement unit, that's when Da Vinci tried to tell me that "using simplify 3D had voided my warranty". Which is BS - don't ever let a company try to tell you that.
At that point, I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. The BBB is a nice organization, but does not have any legal authority. Bringing them in mainly helps when a company is A)registered with them, and B)cares about it's registration. XYZ Printing(the company that makes the Da Vinci) is not registered and has a F- rating. Still, bringing them in put my complaint on the public record AND got me some traction with Da Vinci. Unfortunately the very best they could offer me was to pay shipping on the RMA and extend my warranty by 2 months. Litterally, that was the best they could do. The BBB agreed with me that this was not enough.
At this point I have had the printer for 10 months, it has been broken for 7. Again, I am not certain if I merely have a defective unit, or if XYZ just makes a terrible product. They refused to replace mine, so I went and bought a better printer on my own.
I did, over the course of this process, discover the ultimate fix for your wayward da vincis. The hardware is all good enough, so rip out the brain-board and replace it with an Adriuno running open-source RepRap. That's what I'm doing with mine. Don't buy one. The market is FULL of better, more reliable printers, and if you do get a Da Vinci, you are only going to end up with a door stop.
