This is interesting. Soval has become the budget open source brand. While everyone else is trying to prevent the competition from stealing ideas, Soval has been the contrarian and has been very up front about their desire to be open source.
I have 3 concerns:
First, advertised speeds are never what you can get in the real world. Due to the constant need for changing directions while actually printing. The machines can seldom get enough distance to reach their full speeds. 40,000mm/sec2 means little if the best you can get is 5000mm/sec2 due to all the short moves. So I’ll be curious to hear of what the real speeds are from consumers out in the real world.
Secondly, Soval does not have the best reputation for QC and responsiveness to problems. And they do have problems. It appears you can’t expect Prusa or Bambu level support if disgruntled users can be believed.
And finally, do you really need that print volume at a consumer level? Just how many life sized Mando helmets or Dwyane The Rock Lobsters are you going to print? At $1200, (projected street price), that is a lot of money to spend for a machine that might get used to capacity once or twice over the years you might own it.
Sovol, it’s literally in the title
$1,200 is Voron and RatRig territory. Vorons cap out at 350 mm3 for build volume and 500mm3 rat rigs are $1,550. I agree that plenty of folks are probably over buy on printers, but if you want this kind of build volume the price seems reasonable - especially for a printer that ships assembled. Personally, I went the Voron route and if I wanted a larger printer I would probably either just make my 350mm taller or go the RatRig route.
That said, high velocity on a large format printer isn’t that useful for big prints IMO. You’re probably going be running a bigger nozzle and laying down wide/tall extrusions, which means you’re probably going to be limited by how fast your extruder can melt plastic. That’s the case on my Voron with a Rapido HF with “only” a 0.6mm nozzle, 0.8mm extrusion widths, and 0.3mm layer heights.
That surely was a nice ad.
It’s literally the same (probably exaggerated) marketing material as Sovol themselves are trying to sell their Kickstarter project with, reformatted to look like an article. Not surprising that it has a couple of “Click Here to Buy Now: $999 $1299 ($300 off). Hurry, only 94/200 left!” referral links…
It might be true that Sovol has made some of the least bad budget printers recently, but anyone who has brand loyalty to any of the companies that make cheap 3d printers in China is bound to get disappointed sooner or later. Years ago Creality also made relatively good printers, using high quality parts and with acceptable quality control (e.g. OG Ender 3 era) and when they became market leaders they dropped the quality, and I would be surprised if Sovol didn’t do the same given the opportunity. I’d wait a couple of months after it’s released, and try to find some actual reviews.
3D Printing discord’s List of 3D printers even has a generic warning for Kickstarter printers:
More of a warning against kickstarter machines, up until now almost all of them huge failures, with delays in shipping and troubles in terms of QC. They just use the early backers as free quality check/beta testing for the most part. Remember you are not buying a product on kickstarter, you are paying for a possibility to get a product.
Yeah, I fully agree. Sadly currently printer reviews tend to enshitify themselves everywhere, at least from my perspective. It’s really hard to find reviews that are actually more or less objective and don’t just try to give you a few “alibi downsides”.
Which is bad, both for the community but also for the whole market,because it pushes people into the hands of the few brands that actually at least deliver a product that is working mostly - Bambu is the best example Their support is shit, their company policy is shit,but a buyer can at least hope they “do the trick”. So they knowingly or unknowingly buy into the walled garden.
Not a good perspective for the future.
It’s not just you, there’s a financial incentive to write “reviews” which convince the reader to immediately buy the product, because of referral links. Even disregarding that the fact that it takes much more time and knowledge to write an actual unbiased review, you’ll most likely earn less money as you might dissuade readers from buying it, or even if you just make them think a bit more before going through with the purchase and they end up buying the printer somewhere else. I’ve started referring to these kind of pages as “fake reviews”, it plagues almost every product category and it has made it very unreliable to use the internet for buying advice.
Though I suppose it’s even worse for 3d printing, as some manufacturers have been known to pay youtubers for positive reviews and to lie about their competitor’s printers. And even the ones who don’t get cash in the hand still have some incentive to bias their reviews, as pointing out a printer’s flaws or recommending to buy something else would make them less likely to receive more free products to review in the future.
Traveling or printing? 😁
I’d read the article if you haven’t already. It doesn’t describe if it’s travel or print speed but it does give some other metrics like 40,000mms^2 acceleration. There is a sentence that reads: high-flow hotend capable of pushing 50mm³ of filament per second.