What drove your purchase decision?

[tom 0]

I'm sure for everyone that at least some of the reasoning behind purchasing/building a 3d printer such as the Ultimaker stemmed from the thought "Wow.....THAT'S AWESOME". But what else steered your way?

For me personally its the idea of printing some of my own 3d models into a tangible form. I think it's going to be satisfying in a whole different and exciting way.

So what was it for you?

[ddurant 0]

I used a MBI Cupcake for about 18 months and it was.. uh.. error prone. That and the build area felt really cramped.

I got to meet Erik and see an Ultimaker at Botacon about a year ago and was blown away by the design and speed, even on a pre-release machine. After the show, I ended up having dinner with Erik and Jordan Miller and my "impressed" level just went up - soooo much thought went into these machines!

The day Ultimaker pre-order opened (or maybe it was the day after), I ordered one.

[sprockett 0]

For me it was the wooden box and super cool logo.

And of course the fact its a great printer (pulled the trigger right after seeing ddurants 0.02mm yoda post).

[mr_seeker 0]

was blown away by the design and speed, even on a pre-release machine.

Same. I know Erik from when he used to make Darwin repraps, and he was the reason why I build a Darwin clone. Max speed 32mm/s (when lucky). When Erik showed me that his machine could do crazy speeds, I wanted to know how fast it was. When he told me the speed, I was stunned. For me, it meant that I could change the waiting time from "watching a tv-show and come back" to "make some coffee and come back". I am still curious to know when the machine cant get faster without risking the machine to shake itself from a table or cause damage to itself.

I am still saving for an ultimaker, its on my wishlist for quite some time. Unfortunately I dont have any place to put it (living with my parents and no room for my experiments).

[joergen 2]

I do not regret getting my UM... And while I have been torturing it with high speeds (probably around 150mm per set printing, 300mm jumping, could be more), it has never jumped off the table, nor did it ever gave the impression that it ever would...

[falc 6]

The fact needed something to make plastic models

And certain parts for my rc cars

[Daid 306]

What helped in my decision:

 

• [*:2xbxz8yi]The dutch flag, everything is better with a bit of dutch sauce.
  [*:2xbxz8yi]Clearly good quality prints, the results of most RepRaps wouldn't make me happy.
  [*:2xbxz8yi]Accessible build instructions, I read those before placing my order.
  [*:2xbxz8yi]All parts in 1 kit, no hidden extra costs (even filament is supplied with the kit! and a hex-screwdriver!)

 

[cb0 0]

I dreamed about having a 3D printer since I first read about the RepRap project.

Last December I stumbled upon MakerBot, and saw that there are now Kits that are affordable and nice looking.

After getting some new informations about the actual development of 3D printers, and after comparing the key features of each of them, I was sure Ultimaker is the best.

I think, it delivers the best quality actually available in 3D DIY printing. 0.02mm are just stunning.

The speed looks real great in videos and both, the quality of the UM itself and the quality of the parts it can print, looks great.

In addition to that, there is this great wiki, this great forum and last but not least the super friendly developer team behind the whole product.

Now I CAN'T wait to get my Ultimaker

Hopefully time goes fast and I will get it within the next 2 weeks. After that I hopefully can can tell that this purchase was worth every €.

:mrgreen:

[variador 0]

Why did I purchase an Ultimaker?

My first printer was a Rapman, enough said?

Keeping the structure square while the extruder that includes the feed motor jerks around is almost as hard as getting the z axis to go straight up and down.

Put a Rapman alongside an Ultimaker and you have an engineering design class.

Why a 3d printer? I can make things I want that they don't sell.

[joergen 2]

My reason to buy was sheer panic.

I needed a printer for a project (Sept 2011), and UM was pretty much the only printer that was large enough for my project, and after enough begging and tears, I got one just in time... 3 weeks to learn UM printing and 3D modeling, before the deadline arrived. I got my print finished pretty much the night before the deadline.

(and many many thanks to florian, paul and joris for their help during that difficult time)

 

[xeno 108]

At my work we have a folder with work related information and paper clippings, this is sent to all departments for reading,

in the folder was a paper clipping of an article about the Ultimaker, and really got my attention and did some back ground reading, saw the vid of the program "De Wereld draaid door" and thought got to have it

I ordered my Ultimaker that same day :mrgreen:

 

[albert 2]

I have looked into 3d printing several years ago. I' m a puppeteer and for me the 3d printing process is a great tool. The first thing i tried was the powder printer a la Zcorp. Plaster/binder process. This had to be farmed out and the price for a 17 cm puppet head was about 250€. While I liked the results I got, the models were too heavy and probably too fragile as well. So I kept looking for an alternative where one could do the entire process at home.

I have a FabLab close to where I live and went there to look at the new generation of FDM printers.

I saw the RepRap style machines with their threaded rods and moving print beds ...and just hated the design of them and the slow speeds and well...not very good print quality... It looked very amateurish, and I never had an interest in getting a printer only for the sake of tweaking it out. I wanted results!

Then I saw the Ultimaker and it looked much better...a lightweight printhead, a print bed moving only in the vertical axis, and all of that at a good price. I interviewed the members of the FabLab crew and they had nothing but positive things to say about the machine. So I got one and have never looked back!

[illuminarti 18]

For me the answer can best be illustrated by reference to my past. I had already been lucky enough to be on the front end of two huge technological advances in the past 30-odd years: as a pre-teen I bought one of the first 'home computers' in the UK, taught myself to program, had a game I wrote get picked up by one of the new-fangled 'software companies' and so was hailed (briefly, thank goodness) as 'the UK's youngest professional programmer' at the age of thirteen (in my defense, that's probably more of an achievement in the early 80's than it sounds today).

From there, via a detour to university and stint running my own copywriting and design business, it was a relatively easy step to get involved in the fledgling world of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990's: I designed and wrote some of the first fully-fledged web applications - including commodity trading systems, job vacancy databases, and fantasy sports games - long before any of them were the mainstream concepts they are today. Even now, development, web applications, and Internet security are what my day job is all about.

In both of those cases, though, I remember the excitement of moving into a new field, and recognizing that while there was a huge amount I didn't understand, and I even more that I didn't realize I didn't know – there was no doubt that there was just so much potential for the technology.

And that's exactly what it felt like when I became aware of 3D printing. This was something that was going to be a game changer in so many ways, and I made a conscious decision that I wanted to be a part of that third paradigm shift. At the time - early 2012 - the Ultimaker seemed like the obvious choice to get started - relatively fast, robust, and well-designed. Not cheap, but seemingly offering good value for money. And I've been delighted with it every day since.

At the moment, I'm still learning as much as I can about the printer and the technology, with a view to transitioning my day job into the field as soon as I can. I'm hoping to open a 3D printing space and showroom this summer. Not only do I get a huge kick out of seeing virtual objects take on solid form, but it's also such a thrill to see other people experience it for the first time. My then ten-year-old daughter helped me build my printer, and now knows her way around the entire modeler-slicer-printer toolchain, and regularly goes off and makes her own stuff. The sense of amazement and excitement from everyone else who sees the printer is equally palpable. I can't think of anything more rewarding to do as a job than help bring that technology to more and more people. Its the fusion of geeky tech and practical real world application - for the first time there's an accessible technology that can bridge the rather abstract world of computers and the physical world, and do it in useful ways.

(And as a true geek, I probably came the closest to nirvana so far when I saw all of these key technologies I've worked in fuse together in that moment when ordered my Ultimaker online, while flying at 30,000 feet, over the US East Coast, thanks to the joys of in-flight wifi. It really doesn't get geekier than that :-) )

 

[snowygrouch 1]

4 reasons:

1) I needed a 3D printer to make complex shaped parts, and my budget was about 2000 Euro

2) I needed the printer material to be open source, as I have no interest in the traditional

printer industry "cartridge scam"

3) I wanted to "get in" on 3D printing at home as its clearly the future of manufacturing.

4) At the time of purchase all the other printers in that price-range were rubbish.

 

[ian 32]

I always loved design and experimenting and making things better and being honest, if i kept doing normal 2d building drawings every day in my office, I would have sat myself down under a very aggressive elephant... so then i had some great luck and found the ultimaker, saw the potential to take my 2d information into the 3d world and then into the real world. thanks to ultimaker....

and as i always say to myself what ever happens with my work now... i aint going back.... i have ultimaker in my blood.... :-)

Ian