Burned by Matter and Form
Hi all,
Just got burned by Matter and Form with their scanner.
I've spent the last five hours trying to get it to work, and nothing I was able to do was able to produce an .STL.
Looking at the reviews again, I wondered who these people were who'd used it? .STL Export is a Beta - when you attempt it, it says "Meshing failed - we're working to resolve this issue..." so thats out. .PLY Export resulted in a 321 byte file, probably nowhere near what it should be (considering their .MFC file was 2.65MB, which, coincidently, is not compatible with industry standard software).
In consultation with my adopted brother, we've determined the people "using" this scanner are probably paid reviewers, and Matter and Form have flooded the market with cheap hardware, and even dodgier software. They've had eighteen months to get this thing working, as well as almost a half a million dollars from the IndieGoGo campaign, plus whatever they made in poor suckers like me in presales, and now the product is in the wild, how many more suckers like me have bought it? I've held off my purchase for that eighteen months waiting for the technology to at least work some of the bugs out.
From iReview: "Matter and Form software is very flexible and consumer-friendly. The software, called Matter and Form Scan, works with Window 7 or greater and Mac OS 10.7 or greater." Thats a lie - we're up to 10.9 in their view of the software, and still no OS X host software, meanwhile OS X has gone to 10.10...
This from Robert Mills, a customer on Amazon: "Getting Started: It is suspiciously easy to set up and get started. "Suspicious" because you'd think it would be more complicated. It's not. Follow the simple instructions. Plug it in. Let it calibrate. Start scanning." Thats a lie - it took me over an hour, and three separate reboots of my mates Win7 laptop he generously loaned me as my Win8.1 VM on VMWare Fusion couldn't talk to the scanner, for the scanner to be even recognised by the Win7 laptop! Calibration failed in two different rooms, with different light levels (one lighter, one darker). Scans, when they started, were slow, no option for a "quick scan" to just test. After forty minutes of waiting, with absolutely no response on the screen, no lasers active while scanning (although the calibration run before the scan, one of the lasers was active), the issue with the saved files occured, and I finally gave up and realised I now have an AU$780 paperweight for Christmas.
The promised open source release of software, which may solve these issues, has never eventuated, and now I know why - the software is beyond dodgy, and of course, you need a product key that is on the scanner to get the software and find out the most important features aren't active!
Thanks Matter and Form! Merry Christmas guys, mine will be sodden with more alcohol so I can forget how much I've been burned.