MakerBot Digitizer, Biggest POS I have seen in a long time. The construction is very flimsy, and the lasers are surrounded by a rubber padding that continually misaligns your lasers, this is why MakerBot tells you to recalibrate about every 20 scans. Next the housing and screws for adjusting, these are T-15 Torx screws and one wrong slip and you have stripped them and you are stuck with a very pricey paperweight for your desk. This could be tolerated if it wasn't for the worst part which is the Makerware software, it is extremely unintuitive and there is no way to stop a render once it scans a cloud mesh, it just turns your objects in to blobs. Sure if you want to scan a can, or a soda bottle it pretty much makes it, but anything with the slightest bit of complexity and you had better sign up for a 3D modeling class at your local university as you will need to learn how to use ACAD, Blender, MAYA, or some other 3D design software to repair all the edges, surfaces and parts of your scan that the Makerware software has added to your scan. Our hobby shop purchased one of these and all I can say is that not only is this MakerBot Digitizer a terrible piece of tech, but its price can only be described as criminal as you are going to spend $800+ for the unit and then you had better buy the Makercare service plan if you want to have any clue at all on how to do anything with it. 28 days in and neither of my techs have been able to get it to work to the point where we could "just click twice to scan, and you’re ready to print" as it is described in the marketing material. We all understand that the 3D scanning tech is in its infancy but to push what my techs, wouldn't even dare call a Beta version of a product like this, on the open public and then force them to pay for phone support (as you will have a very difficult time trying to convey your problems over email) is just plain nuts. We have dealt with stubborn manufactures and vendors with poor reliability but never have we seen such raw, and amateur products put up for sale. During my years studying Mechanical Engineering at Charles University in Prague (an extremely prestigious, nearly 700 year old university, http://cuni.cz/ ok it's only 667 years old), a product like this digitizer or the "smart" extruder's for the MakerBot printers would have gotten me kicked out of class or possibly the entire engineering program as these products are so poorly thought-out and roughly designed that I do not even want to think of what school, much less a university would have allowed these people to become engineers. At any rate if you are thinking about getting into 3D printing, be warned if you go this route as you will spend more time with tech support then you will scanning, printing, eating, sleeping or doing anything productive, in summary; just wait as the technology is clearly NOT here yet and companies like MakerBot and others are pushing products that they know are flawed on a unsuspecting public and making them pay a premium price. Thank you all for reading, those of you that made it through. I have to go get something nice for my I.T. guys as I have been pushing them really hard on this 3D scanning/printing problem and I know that they are doing the best they can with what they have but it just simply isn't enough at this time.

MakerBot Troubles and possible fixes                 07-27-2015

Well we have gotten a lot of responces and it seems like this is a very common problem along with other MakerBot Products, Let's see if we can get a Beta sign up program going with MB.

It is sad as they seemed to have started out with some forward thinking and good intentions but then they were bought out, or sold out, and the new CEO and new parent company Stratasys seems to be conscerned only with getting as much money out of people for products that DO NOT DO WHAT THEY ADVERTISE so that they can continue their research. I have asked to be part of any BETA program as I have done this with Intel, AMD, Samsung and a few other companies, they send me confidential pre-production products (usually for 30 days) and i test them and write a report back about what issues, bugs, problems, etc i found and then they take my report along with the report of others in the beta programs and improve the product. This saves on R&D and having to pay employees to do all the grunt work and it give's a limited few the chance to test out new potential products (after you sign confidentiallity forms and the such) and there is some stuff that you can say, like how i got to test the intel Hex core series of CPU's way before they came out, kind of like my friends at MaximumPC and PC World, were you can tell people, "hey look out for a possible new CPU, it should be really great" and leave it at that, unless you are Future Media or some other publication and you have a little more freedom as to what you can say about the products but MakerBot refuses to do any such program which is just a darn shame as it could help them tremendously, especially being a Mechanical Engineer with a minor in Electrical Engineering and lots of real world practice, i would have no problem signing a confidentiallity form or something if it would mean getting to test out and report on new products, and make suggestions on how to make them better. Also with the Hobby Shop we have access to all kinds of tools so we could even make rough prototypes to send back with our suggestion forms to show what works, what doesn't, what is good and what is a useless feature so common MakerBot, get you act together and develope a program like that so this giant community can help improve and develope products with you instead of you hiding products behind closed doors and then rolling out Alpha, or Beta versions of products as "New Products" when you darn well know there are serious problems. So that is more thoughts and suggestions. 

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