It’s that time again: Make: has released its fourth annual 3D printing guide, only this time, they’ve expanded to all sorts of digital manufacturing tools. The “Ultimate Guide to Desktop Fabrication 2016” is out and you can see all of the ‘zine’s 3D printer reviews. Taking the cake is the LulzBot TAZ 5 3D printer, which was ranked as the “Best Overall” FDM 3D printer, but on Make:, you’ll also find reviews for CNC mills and SLA 3D printers, too.
Finding the LulzBot Mini to be a delight, I am not surprised by Make:’s selection of the TAZ 5 as the Best Overall FDM machine. The TAZ also took home the award of “Outstanding Open Source”. In second place, for Best Overall, was the Zortrax M200, a system that 3DPI’s Davide Sher fell in love with, followed by the Rostock Max, also not surprising, given the community’s love for this machine. The Max was also ranked as the Best Value, while the Printrbot Play was deemed Best for Schools and the Printrbot Simple was the Most Portable.
Finally, as far as FDM machines were concerned, the Ultimaker 2 Extended was ranked as the Best Large Format system, which is interesting given the fact that it is not that big, when compared to the Gigabot from re:3D and other much bigger machines. Perhaps this is because of the user-friendliness of the machine and a lower price tag. Davide also seemed to have a lot of fun with this one.
This issue also got into ranking CNC mills for the first time, perhaps inspired by Printbot’s first CNC machine, the Crawlbot, released this year. The Crawlbot took the award for Best Large Format CNC and the Shopbot was the Best Mid-Size model. Make: has not yet gotten into the process of reviewing hybrid fabrication systems, like the FABtotum or ZMorph’s machine, but they did rank the Nomad 883 as the Best Desktop Mill.
Make: is only slowly beginning to review photopolymer 3D printers and, this year, they’ve only got two on their list: the Form 2 from Formlabs and the LittleRP, choosing the Form 2 as the top SLA 3D printer.
The “Ultimate Guide to Desktop Fabrication 2016” is an exciting issue, in that I’m happy to see the inclusion of CNC machines in their list. However, when it comes to 3D printing, 3D Hubs’ guide from last year is still more thorough, as it relies on community ratings, rather than staff ratings. As fun as it is for 3DPI to review 3D printers, there’s nothing like a crowd to tell you what’s up. Still, it’s a useful guide and, once we get a robot that can synthesize both the opinions of media and users and, perhaps, match them up against some Platonic ideal, the more 3D printer guides the merrier!
