Just over a year ago, I shelled out $149 for a Indigogo project called the MOD-t. Why? Well some of my friends had shelled out over $2,000 for MakerBot 3D printers but everytime I looked into those it seemed like they spent more hours on call to tech support than printing. Given how slow those printers are, that was saying something. This was one time where I didn’t feel it was worthwhile being the lead user. But when the MOD-t from New Matter came around, it was so cheap I thought it was worth a try. The video was compelling: it was easy.
The other week my printer arrived. It was just great. Took it out of the box, hooked it up to WiFi and we were printing within 20 minutes. The test print was the New Matter logo.
Unfortunately, the product isn’t quite ready for prime time. The next few tries I faced a corrupted file and then a couple of times where the printing was going strong and then got pushed off. The printer didn’t know that and kept on regardless which was not pretty. It turns out the plate has to be ‘roughed up’ to stop that from happening. In addition, the web controller isn’t really working too well and you really need to be around to keep a watch on things. So the overall vision in the video isn’t quite there.
But it is not far off. The hardware worked, the printer isn’t noisy and then finally I was able to do this:
Its a shark like phone stand but more importantly a successful print.
This really does look like the first 3D printer for the consumer market. But it is as annoying as your first printer. Nonetheless, the potential is there. It is currently available for $399 on the New Matter website. Note, however, that if you are in Canada, they haven’t worked out how to sell you filament yet so you might want to hold off. Otherwise, you will have to wonder whether that shark-phone stand is really filament-worthy.
Digitopoly 