The Most Popular Consumer Level 3D Printers (Chart)

[old man emu]

We just ran a survey ourselves. Keep in mind, it only has 84 respondents and is in no way statistically significant! Nearly all respondents were US based.

Of users with intermediate to advanced design skills, MakerBots held 30% of the market.

Of users with no design skill, or beginner level design skill, MakerBots were quite a bit below Solidoodle, Printrbot, and RepRap.

People with more experience are buying the more expensive machines, and people with less experience are going for cheaper machines.

Drew Taylor
https://3Dagogo.com

That sounds like a realistic result. It shows that as people gain more experience with 3D printing, they are able to progress to the more complex machines.

I was going to ask where the DIY machines would fit in, but I think that there are very few in the whole 3D printing community who would bother with designing and producing their own entry level machine. I bought a Mendel Prusa i3 for $US595 plus postage. Landed at my door it cost the same as the first CNC machine I built, and the Prusa was cut out ready to assemble.

Old Man Emu

[mechadense]

Google trends gives an interesting graph:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore...idoodle&cmpt=q

[Rainday21]

I really thought that MakerBot was more popular than Ultimaker. I also thought Cube was a lot more popular than what this graph shows. Honestly I don't know how accurate this graph really is....

The google trends graph seems to be a bit more accurate. It shows that Makerbot is well out in the lead.

[JohnA136]

The Google trend graph is based on searches? If you frequent the MakerBot forums, you would see that there are thousands of discussions mostly related to solving inherent design deficiencies, griping about customer services and people producing fixes and replacement parts. That has to skew the graph!

DTaylor, I thing you are spot on about the trend in buyers! Like most hobbies, people start to get in "on the cheap" until they see if it is something that they are really interested in and then they invest more into it. I see it with RC Hobbies, Robotics, Gun enthusiasts, Car Enthusiasts, and 3D printing enthusiasts.

Derek, were you at Maker Faire NY? Joe has been there the past few three years and everyone that has met him would agree with you. We have built tons of printers since 2010 and last year we built several Prusa i3s. They are compact, easy to build, solid, reliable and have great printing volume. While there are scores of under $700.00 3D Printers out there now, you would be hard pressed to find many better than his design.