Ultimaker impressive quality at 0.075 mm layer height
I printed one famous treefrog on my Ultimaker for a friend and realized I forgot to speak so far about the overall quality you can reach with an Ultimaker. |
| It gets hard to feel the layers by sliding your nail. The most prominent place where layers show up is between the eyes. |
The frog was sliced with 0.075 layers. I probably could go a bit further to 0.05 mm, at which point other hardware factors probably would not make it worth. It did not take that much time to print (it's mostly hollow), something like 30 minutes at 60 mm/s.
My configuration was probably very slightly over-extruding as there are a few blobs on the legs, but I got a nice feedback from my friends (which know about industrial filament-based 3D printing). Printing that thin with wood makes no sense because of the much higher roughness of the material.
Finally, I should try printing it in PLA white, because the details and layers seem to vanish with this specific color and material.
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| How fat are my thingerprints! Joris option in Cura sometimes prevents the seam near the mouth (unused here) |
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| And this is the limit of my macro setup but show how big is half a millimeter at this scale! |
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| Here is a human hair of mine on the frog. I failed picking one that's not white after 3 attempts ;) |
There are interesting slight wavy patterns that develop on the side of the frog, which are not related to the layers but that does not look like the usual resonance waves that we see when the belts are not tight enough.
There is no specific direction and no reason for a brutal change of direction in the part of the object, and it does not look as bad as usual (though it is certainly a hardware issue). I did not get the effect on other parts of the frog.
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| Strange wavy patterns that show up on the frog side (the hard light better shows the artefact) |
Off-topic: what about other printers ?
I don't know if other hobbyist printers may achieve this precision. The mechanical structure of the Ultimaker is really welldone, where the head is light, the case is sturdy and the bed only goes down.Printers like the Makerbot or Up! should also achieve great results when finely tuned, but as for me I really chose the right printer :)
Still and as a final pun, the MakerBot Replicator 2 is bragging loudly about its 0.1 mm layer resolution, claiming further that it sets "a new standard in professional looking models and true-to-life replicas" ! Sorry, but I would better see real prints and closeups!... Moreover, they cowardly refuse to compete against other in printing challenges, so better beware of the obvious, corporate and expensive bullshit that they are selling you ;)