Best FFF Under $2500?

[jimc]

mitch, here is a spool holer i printed yesterday at .2 height on the m2. it is black and a perfectly straight column so a good example of layer alignment and smooth surface. this is done in abs. at .1 it would look even better. .2 never looks bad, hell i print at .3 all the time but i do notice a difference between .1 and .2 so i dont know what those other guys were talking about. i do have to say this though, on any printer its as much the operator as it is the printer. its all about settings, tuning and getting the max out of the hardware. i have seen tons of crappy prints come off an m2 and i have also seen beautiful prints come off the m2 as well. i have a client with a 100k stratasys dimension and the spool holder i n the pic is of as good or better quality that would come off that machine.

[mitchfx]

So I ended up pulling the trigger on the Rapide Lite 200XL off IndieGoGo. Off all the print samples I was shown or received, their's was the best with least visible layer lines. The samples from the M2 that my friend and the guys at Makergear printed all had very prominent layers at 100 microns compared to what I'm getting from the Dremel. Maker's Toolworks never produced a sample from the MendelMax 3, nor did anyone on the Ultimaker forum (except one guy who printed a test on the Replicator 2 for some reason). During that same period I got print samples from the XL run by both the CEO of Rapide 3d and the first customer to receive an early unit...plus THREE more by users of the older RL200 model.

I also really like the UI of the included touchscreen as well as the all aluminum chassis which looks very sleek. The unites are supposed to ship in May. Once I get mine I will follow up with a mini-review here

Thanks to Joao for the lead on this unit and for running a test print for me!

-M