Sketch Single-Printer Setup 3D Printer with Cloud Printing File Management Software for One Teacher and Five Students

A solid 3D printer. Not super easy to customize settings and limited in presets. But a good workhorse for lots of standard prints. For the price I'd really like to see better features, more robust software, and better customer support. But it is definitely a good out of the box solution, especially for a school.

I bought a Sketch for college level instruction. The plan was to print out molecules to show to the students as a teaching aid. The salesman I spoke with before buying told me that the printer was capable of doing this, but after over a month of emails and troubleshooting I'm sending the printer back because it can’t do anything that I was promised. Any model of remote complexity is too big for the printer. Not in physical size, but in the size of the print file. In order to make models that can be handled and are rigid enough to remove the breakaway support you must increase the number of shells from the default of 2 to 4 or 5. The printer cannot do this, which means all the models I printed would just break apart in my hands. No matter how I change the physical dimensions there is no way around the file size being too big for the printer if I want a model robust enough to handle. Another serious problem is the software. You cannot use .stl files, but instead have to convert them into .makerbot files. You do this using their cloud print server (which is very slow and mostly fails) or download makerbot print to your PC or Mac. The PC version occasionally works, but recently fails every time, and the Mac version will not install on my computer running Big Sur. Finally, tech support seems very inexperienced with both the printers and software. They gave me a list of "hacks" - none of which worked. When I sent my .stl file for them to work on they never even attempted to see if they could get it to print, or figure out why the printer was saying the file was too large. They sent me a .makerbot file to try but forgot to include the base support which caused the print job to fail. Overall it was a big waste of my time. I was hoping that 3D printing had come a long way since I first saw a printed molecule about 10 years ago, but this company has failed to make any progress. Unless you are printing out Lego bricks, find your 3D printer elsewhere.