Jagowilson, I've always admired your "never give up" attitude and willingness to help. You've also helped me quite a bit and I'm thankful for that.
But I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with your post. If we were talking over pm or email, I wouldn't see a point to argue about this, but there are others in this forum who I don't agree have to go through all that trouble we have.
So sorry, but I'll have to respond to all you said and sorry if it will seem harsh, it's just my honest opinion...
But first about the chargeback thing,
jagowilson wrote:You realize most banks sign a contract with Visa that explicitly forbids the use of chargebacks, right?
Never had problem with chargebacks. Any source?
And most credit card companies only protect purchases to s set amount, usually $300-$500.
Any source for this too?
And you do know besides chargebacks many countries also have actual laws that are legally binding that allow you to demand refund for certain items for certain duration of time, or at the very least agencies that receive feedback from customers and pressure companies to act better, like the ones I linked?
If you want your money's worth, either fix the machine or sell it someone who can.
You may not like this response, but I fail to see how you have any other options.
I just listed some options...
Complaining on here is not making any machines work and I think the entire concept behind this thread goes against a lot of what this community stands for.
Complaining here allows
1) Newcomers who are considering to get a Solidoodle to have a clearer picture of what they are getting into.
I only wish there was such a topic when I first learned about Solidoodle. I wouldn't have a Solidoodle now, wouldn't have wasted so much time and experienced so much frustration, needlessly.
2) Just having somewhere for people to express their frustration and release the heat...
I love bashing SD's poor decisions all day but I will not back the anti-upgrade sentiment emerging like a cancer in this thread.
And I'll say the same about the pro-upgrade opinions.
Look, first of all, if you're gonna fix the issues of your product instead of pressuring the company to make better quality products in the first place, they're not going to change the quality of their products.
If you aren't ingenious enough to fix the machine, are you ingenious enough to actually make anything useful with your printer?
And I strongly disagree here.
Someone close to me got an Ultimaker 2 recently. Worked out of the box with no issues. No problems since. Will he need to learn some internals when something gets damaged, etc? Until there is something like a repair service for 3d printers, Yes. But when will that happen? And how much will he need to learn if say he needs to replace his extruder motor? Obviously not take apart the whole machine and learn all that electronics and mechanics and do hours of testing, trial and error like we had to.
This is like saying if you don't know how your PC works, you can't make something good out of it...
3d designers use 3d printers.
Architects do.
These are artistic people, most of them don't know electronics, programming, engineering...
Heck, even people with no 3d skills download STL models from Thingiverse or similar and print useful or useless stuff they want to.
I understand where you're coming from. Until 3d printers are more mainstream and mass produced, the failure rate is going to be high and you're going to have to know low-level stuff to maintain it, but unlike few years ago now there are (expensive) 3d printers that have low failure rate, easy software and (so) *not* targeted and tinkerers. This is what Sam Servantes wanted Solidoodle Press to be too and looks like it failed.
"Targeted at mainstream consumers" by his own words, quoted from here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkZCgX2WOuc
And people who bought it expected that too. Most are not going to fix it either because they know there is no need to do all that for getting a 3d printer to work, by just looking at other 3d printers, or simply because they can't.
And there's nothing we can do to change that obviously.
And lets be honest, even most of us "tinkerers" haven't gotten our printers to work "perfectly" after months of tinkering. I just read someone already seeing issues with the "direct drive" mod everyone is talking about recently.
So suggesting newcomers who bought a "plug and play" machine and likely don't have much technical knowledge to upgrade or fix it when some of us "tinkerers" haven't been able to even fix ours completely is just bad advice to me and suggesting them to spare their money and time while they can isn't...
Solidoodle 4