September 2016 – Page 30 – 3d Printer reviews and information

I’ve been fascinated with Tiko’s campaign from when it was still active. I’m not a backer, but I check back in from time to time to see what’s going on.Here’s their latest update: http://ift.tt/2ckjFry update is mildly crazy, if you ask me. First, if you want to uncover the whys and hows of the issues, you have to actually ignore all of the technical problems they listed. The main issue is that they started shipping units without adequate QC.This isn’t speculation, this is their own admission.What’s wild, though, is the justification they’re giving for it. They’re effectively blaming a “vocal minority” of people complaining that they’re taking way too long and made decisions contrary to what they know they should have done to quiet the unrest. That’s just ABSURD.Tiko has been more than happy to throw thousands of words of marketing and business speak at the backers to continue to appease them and buy another month. Then they suddenly feel like they’ve reached a tipping point when there have been people complaining for a long time? What changed? Probably nothing.My honest opinion is that they screwed up by shipping too soon and the “vocal minority” bit is their attempt to save face a little – but I think it does the exact opposite. The excuse, as written, literally just claims that they chose not to do what they knew was correct because of some internet trolls.I’m honestly surprised they’ve made it this far, but you have to wonder how much they’ve spent getting here with only 200 units shipped and some significant amount of them with critical failures: at least 19.5% according to their report. That’s a 1-in-5 chance of getting a machine with serious problems. It’s also worth noting that many of these issues are explicitly design problems too – not manufacturing or shipping problems. Hopefully they make it through the entire production run before running out of money. More than a few kickstarters have only partially delivered their rewards and left a lot of backers with nothing because they have zero income and too much debt as measured by hardware they need to ship out.I’m not trying to just rag on Tiko here, but the kickstarter printer phenomenon probably isn’t going to go away. People need to be reminded that you’re not buying a product when you support a kickstarter printer. You’re funding the development of a product that may or may not (probably may not) deliver on all of its claims. I think Tiko had and has good intentions to deliver on time, but we’re almost a year after delivery date and we’ve only seen 200 printers ship with no meaningful QC on the production run resulting in many impaired units going out to backers.As always, buyer beware (especially if all you’re buying is a promise).TL;DR: Tiko started shipping production units instead of QC’ing the production run effectively “to shut up the haters” according to their latest update. http://ift.tt/2cDQjUC