@edf Thank you for the concise and passionate summary. This is exactly my point.
I can deal with a few factory defects. I’ve worked in IT for over a decade in multiple industries. I get it, sometimes your suppliers don’t do good QA on their parts and so your end product suffers.
When this happens, typically a manufacturer will replace the parts at a discounted cost or for free entirely if the machine is within warranty. My machine is less than a year old. This is well within a typical warranty period.
This doesn’t account for the failure to properly test their software though and that, at best, represents a major oversight in their quality assurance testing in that regard.
The people who act like this is somehow the fault of a consumer for expecting the company to make a quality product at a premium price are extremely difficult to comprehend. I thoroughly believe if they had the experience we did there would be a very different tune being sung.
Truthfully, I don’t want to sell the machine, I want a refund. SM won’t do that though, so my only option to recover some of my investment is to sell it, so if you’re someone who thinks this is my fault somehow and the machine is great…
As others pointed out it would be unethical for me to sell my machine without telling the buyer of the defects and issues I had. I also would like to recover some of my investment on a product that has pretty clearly been misrepresented as a quality product as evidenced by the numerous threads on the seemingly infinite issues it has. So I can accept these issues make the idea of paying money for a piece of trash distasteful
However this is precisely my point
Many of these machines have turned out to be absolute garbage with a high roller price tag justified and hidden behind a 3-1 feature set where one function doesn’t work and the other two are underpowered.
SM has run a vicious burn on their customers and their solution to their inability to perform quality checks or product testing is to have the customer give them more money.
I appreciate all who have come forward in support of my story and shared their own. To those who continue to try to blame me for purchasing a product expecting it to perform as advertised, well I wish you the best and I’m happy you love your purchase.
To reiterate, this thing was over $2000 when it was on sale when I bought it. I also got the dual extrusion head and the 10W laser with it which substantially increased the price. It sits next to a machine less than half it’s price, and I have had to resolve precisely none of the issues I had with SM on the cheaper machine. While the other two functions have gone almost completely unused. Effectively making it a single function device that doesn’t reliably function.
I didn’t need to calibrate the freaking extruder on the S1. I assembled it, plugged it in, installed the filament and printed stuff faster than the SM with better quality using factory default settings all along the way. Under no circumstances should this have been the case, and there are dozens, if not hundreds of people who have had the same experience I had. I simply believe any organization should be held accountable for what appears to be either baffling incompetence or outright negligence in assuring their product actually functions when it sells that product at a price point in which it is expected to be done properly.
It isn’t a $150 dollar home made printer. It’s a machine billed as the ultimate desktop maker machine with precision engineering. SM needs to act like it and correct this issue for the numerous customers who they burned.
I didn’t intend for this to devolve into this discussion, but I think it is pretty clear that there has been an egregious mistake on SMs part and it is one that only festers the more they ignore it.
Those mentioning purchasing additional SM equipment, I would HIGHLY discourage that notion for no reason other than it is precisely what they seem to want in order to cover their own mistakes. Not to mention the probability of it fixing or improving your experience being apparently relatively low. Especially when compared to competitive products in those areas.
Hope you have a good one too boo boo.