14 DAY TRIAL // Solidoodle is one of the better known names on the 3D printing market. Not so much as Stratasys and MakerBot perhaps, but still quite famous. In particular, it has built a reputation for affordable products. Now, a new such product has been introduced.
Said product goes by the name of Solidoodle Press and is a consumer 3D printer with a price tag of only $350 / €350. Sure, it's just an early pre-sale and the actual retail tag will be of $600 / €600 once true sales begin in September, but it's still an offer you can take advantage of.
Besides the price, the most notable advantage of the Solidoodle Press is its design, like a cube with smoothed edges.
There are other closed-chamber 3D printers of course, but they aren't very many, and most 3D printers look like odd contraptions with an open-air bed and a moving print head that goes all over the place.
In other words, 3D printers aren't often very glamorous, and the ones with this type of shape and closed chamber don't have a very large build volume either, most of the time.
Given all that, it is quite impressive that the Solidoodle Press can manage plastic parts up to 8 x 8 x 8 inches / 203 x 203 x 203 mm (or 200 x 200 x 200 mm if you want to round things up). It has a heated build platform with glass bed.
1.75mm plastic filament (ABS/PLA) is supported, no surprises there. The resolution of 100 microns is pretty normal as well, so the quality of the prints won't be any better than on most other consumer 3D printers. Still makes the low price impressive though.
All in all, the new 3D printer measures 15. x 15.4 x 19.2 inches / 381 x 391 x 487.68 inches and weighs 18 pounds / 8.16 kilos.
The Solidoddle Press 3D printer is a very interesting product release after the price cuts applied to the company's other printers (of $100 / €100). It is also queer in that it starts off with a lower price than the one that most buyers will have to meet, later down the line. Then again, we suppose that early bird fire sales have been done before, often enough.
Anyone buying the Solidoodle Press now will get a protected spool (will prevent filament from jamming) or an automatically calibrating printing bed. Essentially, the company tried to make the early sale appealing to newcomers to the 3D printing market.
