[BetaBeat]
“We’ve been engineering our tails off to bring you the best personal 3D printer and we rejected the proprietary cartridge model for printing materials which other companies use, because we encourage sharing and iteration,” MakerBot founder Bre Pettis wrote last week on the MakerBot Industries blog.
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The 3D printing ecosystem is taking off, and more competitors are slipping into the space. The Cube, which starts at a very affordable $1,299, is the tiny, slick, Wifi-enabled printer that has some pundits speculating it may be the first 3D printer to appeal to the mainstream consumer. The Cube uses proprietary printer cartridges, with plastic available in ten colors. “With our EZ load Cartridge changing to a different color or replacing an empty cartridge is a breeze,” Cube says on its site.
It may be EZ, but it’s not open, maker movement purists say. “I know it’s an odd balance between wanting 3D Printing to go mainstream by making it extremely user-friendly and removing barriers, but when you hand me closed up cartridges of filament and everything is ‘pop it in and go, replace through our store using our proprietary fittings and canisters’ it feels really foreign to the whole Maker movement,” user Tim Owens commented on the post. …
See the full story here: http://betabeat.com/2012/05/14/maker-movement-purists-bothered-by-closed-system-3d-printing-cartridges/