I ordered one at full retail the day they were announced on 11/18, and it took weeks and weeks to arrive, on 12/9. 3DS apologized, explaining that demand had far outstripped supply, so they gave us a free copy of Cubify Sculpt (smart move on their part, we probably wouldn't have bought it anyway so it didn't cost them a dime, but gave them nice customer relations marks). I can now get Senses through my distributor, Ingram Micro, but at the time I just wanted one right away.

Right off the bat I couldn't get the software to work, it would crash and burn every time I tried to run it. After much back and forth with tech support, we determined that the 1.8GHz dual core Centrino in my Dell Latitude 620 laptops that I use to run my printers was not up to the task. They say you need an i5 minimum, but I have been using it on a Dell Inspiron with an i3 and it works fine.

I am still learning how to use it. It is not nearly as easy as the video suggests, and it is easy for it to "lose tracking". When that happens you need to somehow line up the scanner really close to where it lost it or else start over. I have had to start over a LOT. I consider myself still in learning mode with this piece of equipment and the software.

It comes with a relatively short USB cable, and the only practical way to use it is to cradle a laptop in the crook of your elbow while you carefully walk around the object you are scanning. This scanner does seem optimized for scanning people, but that is just fine, that's the main reason I got it. It is not nearly as accurate or detailed as my Makerbot digitizers, but obviously does much larger objects. One of the market segments I intend to go after with my store is the wedding market, where I can put the bride and groom on top of their own wedding cake.

I have gotten to where i can do busts fairly well, but have only been successful on one out of two attempts to do an entire person, and even that one, it did not recognize the subject's legs as they stuck out from her skirt. The other attempt turned out really badly, with a mutated face, a doubled up hand and one leg ending just above the ankle and the other about midway down the shin.

I have found that busts often end up leaning forward, so I have learned to use meshmixer's slice on a plane function to correct that. You need to use the align function to get the resulting cut normal to the Z-axis.

The software has very few tweaks and settings, it is clearly intended for non-geek, non-hacker types. Once you capture the mesh, you can then trim unwanted parts, then solidify, then trim some more, smooth and touch up. I have found that I don't need to use these functions much and I can do more in meshmixer later on. The panning function only goes in 90° increments, so it is kind of limited too. You must use a scroll mouse to be able to zoom.

I think the solidify function is probably the most sophisticated part of the whole package, and imagine there is a lot of magic code going on there.

You can see images of some of my results in my store here. For the money, it is a pretty impressive piece of hardware. It is NOT as easy to use as they imply, but frankly none of this 3D printing stuff is.