@Russ- Yeah I think for many things you are right but this printer is starting to get to the level of detail where huge poly reductions will affect surface quality and details (I consider taking a 10 million polygon model made up of many parts and reducing it to 250k polys huge reduction). It depends on scale of print. The more realistic head in this thread I posted I had printed out on a B9 at 1/8th scale and everything but skin pores were captured. This printer is even better. I get very high poly models printed out from Ownage and they say not to decimate models. They said that if you can see facets on the screen at the scale you are printing you will see them on the print. Now I don't know what the XY and Z resolution of their 3D printer is but it's obviously really really good. I think for FFF/FDM and older desktop DLP/STL printers you are correct but this printer seems to be able to grab more detail than most people are used to. 37 microns is less than a human hair. It would be a shame if the software was the bottleneck that prevented all the details from showing up in a print. I'm not against reduction but I have a few models with many many pieces that even after each is decimated down won't go below 1 million without getting huge loss of details. This printer also prints large models that drastic reduction in polys will probably show up in the print even at 100 microns which is only slightly larger than a human hair. Either way I am excited to get this printer. I will be frustrated if the software gets in the way of the hardware but I'll get over it.

As far as STLs are concerned I don't have a good STL exporter that is reliable. Max/Maya/Softimage/Zbrush are all kind of bad. OBJ is a format that everything seems to be able to export. And the file sizes seem better in my experience linear or not. Not having to worry about exporting STL would be a great feature. For those of us that are non-CAD users this would be great. As far as I know when you import a model into a 3D printers software it has to convert it to slices that are more like black and white 2d images rather than converting to STL. STL is a very old out of date file format. OBJ is as well but it's universal. STL isn't so much anymore, not outside of CAD.

The largest file I have had printed was around 12 million polys done at Ownage. Came out amazing. I had a 500k poly model printed on a B9(head in my last post). Really I'm not too concerned. If I have to get final models printed from Ownage to get around low polygon counts that's fine. But really this printer is so good I don't think I will have to. Especially if the software is 64 bit and is clean and can handle good numbers of polys.

I work in video games and we prototype toys. Our 3D printer has great XY and Z resolution but for some stupid reason it came on a Windows 98 machine and can't be moved or upgraded(our IT department tried). Because of that it craps out at around 300k polygons. Talk about a horrible software/computer solution. It wasn't cheap either. $80k. Glad I didn't buy it. The polygon reduction kills many of our models but they are only prototypes so it's not a big deal. When you have highly detailed 3D models that have dozens of parts, it's really amazing how fast 300k polys happens.

Kenzie