Comment on Budget-friendly Sovol SV08 Max redefines large-format 3D printing with Insane 700 mm/s speeds
fhein@lemmy.world 2 days agoIt’s literally the same (probably exaggerated) marketing material as Sovol themselves are trying to sell their Kickstarter project with, reformatted to look like an article. Not surprising that it has a couple of “Click Here to Buy Now: $999 $1299 ($300 off). Hurry, only 94/200 left!” referral links…
It might be true that Sovol has made some of the least bad budget printers recently, but anyone who has brand loyalty to any of the companies that make cheap 3d printers in China is bound to get disappointed sooner or later. Years ago Creality also made relatively good printers, using high quality parts and with acceptable quality control (e.g. OG Ender 3 era) and when they became market leaders they dropped the quality, and I would be surprised if Sovol didn’t do the same given the opportunity. I’d wait a couple of months after it’s released, and try to find some actual reviews.
3D Printing discord’s List of 3D printers even has a generic warning for Kickstarter printers:
More of a warning against kickstarter machines, up until now almost all of them huge failures, with delays in shipping and troubles in terms of QC. They just use the early backers as free quality check/beta testing for the most part. Remember you are not buying a product on kickstarter, you are paying for a possibility to get a product.
philpo@feddit.org 2 days ago
Yeah, I fully agree. Sadly currently printer reviews tend to enshitify themselves everywhere, at least from my perspective. It’s really hard to find reviews that are actually more or less objective and don’t just try to give you a few “alibi downsides”.
Which is bad, both for the community but also for the whole market,because it pushes people into the hands of the few brands that actually at least deliver a product that is working mostly - Bambu is the best example Their support is shit, their company policy is shit,but a buyer can at least hope they “do the trick”. So they knowingly or unknowingly buy into the walled garden.
Not a good perspective for the future.
fhein@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s not just you, there’s a financial incentive to write “reviews” which convince the reader to immediately buy the product, because of referral links. Even disregarding that the fact that it takes much more time and knowledge to write an actual unbiased review, you’ll most likely earn less money as you might dissuade readers from buying it, or even if you just make them think a bit more before going through with the purchase and they end up buying the printer somewhere else. I’ve started referring to these kind of pages as “fake reviews”, it plagues almost every product category and it has made it very unreliable to use the internet for buying advice.
Though I suppose it’s even worse for 3d printing, as some manufacturers have been known to pay youtubers for positive reviews and to lie about their competitor’s printers. And even the ones who don’t get cash in the hand still have some incentive to bias their reviews, as pointing out a printer’s flaws or recommending to buy something else would make them less likely to receive more free products to review in the future.