1 of 2
A 3D printing love story
2 of 2
indiegogo/PrintM3
PrintM3
Would you buy this, based on a render?
Every day I take a look through the latest 3D printing offerings on various crowdfunding platforms, some are ambitious, genuine folks in their garage with something great to offer; some are slick PR operations for printers that didn’t really need the crowdfunding but it fitted in with their marketing schedule; some are just outright bizarre.
Take this Delta 3D Printer launched on Indiegogo yesterday by PrintM3, or the printer is called PrintM3 I'm not too sure. Anyway the $139 super early bird price tag, which is $10 cheaper than the MOD-t launched last week to much acclaim, got tongues a-wagging and fingers a-typing.
Now far be it from me, who has been reprimanded, perhaps rightly so, for calling foul on a 3D printer before, to call the PrintM3 out but there’s something not quite right about their indiegogo page.
The multitude of bizarre free-to-make videos - the love story one (above) in particular, is rubbish, a lack of information on hardware and badly photoshopped logos onto renders all worry me but amongst the smorgasbord of inaccuracies and misinformation this quote at the bottom is the one I’d like to take umbrage with most: “Shipment fees not inclusive. We will notice you at a later date.”
So can we get a rough estimate? Are we going to pay the $139 dollars (which, by the way, has sold out now) and then get hit with a $500 shipping bill? Whether you like them as a company or not this campaign, without a working prototype, could not have existed on Kickstarter. Indiegogo have been in the internet’s bad books lately after they surreptitiously changed how they review fraud cases.
This particular campaign could well be bad PR - an innocent campaign from somebody whose grasp of the English language isn't great and without decent marketing skills but it is not a campaign I’d be willing to back personally.
It seems to me highly unlikely that PrintM3’s printer will get funded (nor will the creator’s other bizarre campaign for a faceless watch) and therefore all of the money will go back to those who have pledged, in which case all’s well that ends well. It does worry me, however, that people seem so willing to toss away their money for a product they've never seen from a company that don't have a website or even a facebook/twitter in order to contact them should anything go array.
