kazl

Ultimaker just hasn't meaningfully progressed since the UM3. Every single upgrade since came with a significantly greater price tag while not meaningfully improving the actual printing. The price difference between the UM3 and S3 is the price of a Bambu Lab X1. For what exactly? A color screen? Some relatively small improvements? Oh sure I know the S5 has a significantly larger build volume, at 330 x 240 x 300 vs the 230 x 190 x 200 of the UM3, but it's also double the price. You can have a farm of Bambu X1's for the price of a single S7. And they'll all out print the S7. $11K for the S7 bundle isn't much for the corporate clients which Ultimaker now exclusively targets. While they may not care about the price to performance, they will eventually notice that there's better quality printers that can deliver even faster results. When I picked up two Ultimaker 3's some 6 years ago, I was excited for the future of 3D Printing. I never would have thought that right then and there I was already at the apex of Ultimaker and that it would be all downhill from there. It shouldn't have turned out like this.

I experience the same on my UM3's.

Resin printing is expensive. Formlabs resin is $150 a liter and you can roughly estimate 1L to be ~1 kg as far as material usage. Some third party ones are $60-100 but I've had worse results with those. But the results do speak for themselves as far as resolution is concerned and it is a night and day difference from FDM. Not only that but I've also found it to be consistently faster than my Ultimaker 3's. As for actual material properties you can get resins which will behave like rubber, behave like ABS and lots of other plastics for functional requirements. But you won't be able to melt them. Having started with a Resin printer and moved into FDM, I find them to be nice for using regular thermal plastics and being cheap to print. UM3's already were a bit pricey being such a heavily commoditized technology, but still it wasn't unreasonable to have a group of them humming away printing either multiple parts or sets of whatever you need. Take away the cost advantage and you've seriously degraded that value proposition. At at the S5 Pro price point of $9K you have SLS opened up as an option and Nylon power made parts are quite incredible in their resolution and matching strength. But if you must get an FDM printer, why not just go with a Statasys at that point? The F120 is $12K but then at least you're getting a whole other level of quality and consistency.

I can understand the AirManager being specifically for the S5, but why the MaterialStation? I don't see any good reason why it couldn't work with an S3/UM3 bar artificial segmentation. The entire announcement is... shockingly bad. For $900 more Ultimaker is giving you a touch screen and a feed sensor. Is there anything else? Then the S5 gets a AirManager which is just a cover with what honest to god looks like a Hakko FA400 shoved at the end. The Material Station at least has a bit of promise but not for the price. All3DP states that a fully decked out S5 is going to cost $9,100. For that kind of money you can pick up the gigantic Form 3L. Or an SLS printer. The Makerbot Method by comparison looks reasonable.

Is anyone able to get nice clean prints when using Ultimaker's Breakaway filament? Using the default settings I get a giant mess of stringing. I've played with the settings to try to get a better result but it has been consistently awful.

Looks to me to be FDM printer which is designed for non stop printing of parts for use in production (as opposed to prototyping). The problem for doing something like this is that you want to be able to automate as much as possible. But trying to do that with Ultimaker's existing printers runs into the issue of parts removal. Competitors like Formlabs has an excellent large build platform removal clamp. Thanks to that, Formlab's automation solution, the Form Cell, was easily able to work with their existing printers. Unfortunately the Ultimaker S5 and Ultimaker 3 aren't able to copy such a set up as the glass build platform is held in place with flimsy metal clamps. This is a real pain point as if you really want to get the most out of your equipment investment you need it working non stop. Having a complicated part which may be a 12 hour print finish in the middle of the night is not ideal, as you're not going to have anyone around to remove the part and set the printer to print again. But if you have automated part removal such that the printer can start printing the next one then you're getting a lot more utility out of that piece of equipment. In addition to that it looks like you have a full enclosure and maybe a built in filament dry box.