ZCorp’s Good, Bad and Ugly

By on April 21st, 2009 in blog

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Desmoda tells all in a recent expose of his experiences using ZCorp 3D printers over the past few years. While ZCorp’s devices are praised – for speed, consumable cost and color capabilities, Desmoda reveals the dark side of using the devices, including:
  • Problems obtaining a suitable smooth finish, as the raw printouts are “plastery”
  • The time required to post-process printed objects
  • Difficulties in printing solid black (“greyish”) and solid white (“yellowish”) material
  • Whitening of models due to excessive humidity affects on the hardening agent
You can watch a great video of the ZCorp printing process here. It’s interesting to note that the video (and most others you’ll encounter) do not show the post-processing work.

Clearly, not optimal. But still very useful, as many businesses do use ZCorp daily. We think (as Desmoda does) that this may be an opening for ZCorp’s competitors to leverage.

Via Desmoda

By Kerry Stevenson

Kerry Stevenson, aka "General Fabb" has written over 8,000 stories on 3D printing at Fabbaloo since he launched the venture in 2007, with an intention to promote and grow the incredible technology of 3D printing across the world. So far, it seems to be working!

4 comments

  1. While Zcorp is certainly no silver bullet, it is still the fastest, most affordable, and only technology for 24bit color. There are ways to get around the hurdles mentioned, unfortunately, many are trade secrets and rarely shared in this VERY competitive industry.

    However, a safe bet is to not only ordered parts from an established and informative bureau (such as halfpriceprototypes.com), but also seek the same service if you are looking to purchase a 3D printer. For example, EMS, Inc provides very thorough On-Site training including tips from the professionals that know the technology inside and out. Many of these techniques have actually been developed in their labs and passed down to Z Corp. Their website is http://www.ems-usa.com

  2. As a heavy RP technique user (MeshLab is used a lot in this context) I would like to add some notes about the items listed above:

    1) For me this is a nice feature! In some context the sandy but detailed finish of the zcorp output is really welcome. Just to cite an example, by personal experience, in Cultural Heritage reproductions the smooth, plastic finish is usually considered very ‘fake’, while the raw-stone finishing is much better considered.

    2) true, but this holds for a lot of different RP techniques (e.g. think to removal of supports)

    3) true, the quality of their colors must be improved, definitely, but currently there are not many other options around for 3D color printing…
    4) no comments here.

    On the other and I would add that reproduced objects with this kind are more fragile than you could expect, and that it is much more easy to stain and mess up them if you touch them many times with not perfectly clean hands…

    I will add something more on this subject and about the possibility of better exploiting the zcolor printing capabilities on the meshlab blog (http://meshlabstuff.blogspot.com“ REL=”nofollow”>meshlabstuff.blogspot.com) in the next days…

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