Digitrax 3D MH5 - 5 Extruder Printer

[Brian_Krassenstein]

Vietnam-based company Digitrax 3D has unveiled their Digitrax MH5 5-Extruder 3D printer. The machine itself seems fairly impressive, able to print with all five extruders at once. Additionally, each extruder's temperature can be adjusted independently from one another. Below you will find some of the MH5's specifications.

• Print Resolution: 100μ
• Filament Size: 1.75
• Filament Material Compatibility: PLA for MH5, PLA, ABS for HD Version 5.1
• Machine size: 77 x 57 x 55 cm
• Build Envelope: 28 x 28 x 20 volume printing Coming soon: 60x30 cm
• Nozzle diameter: 0.4

More details on the company and this machine can be found here: http://3dprint.com/36163/digitrax-mh5-3d-printer
Let's hear your thoughts on the Digitrax MH5. Check out a picture of the machine below:

[soofle616]

Been seeing a few machines like this recently. It seems this is a push to make 3d printing more mass production capable by simply multiplying the number of parts per print without adding more print time. All well and good if you're doing the same thing over and over again but my only real need for a printer is protoyping which doesn't benefit from having 5 of the exact same (fairly small) item. What would be really impressive is for a machine to have multiple extruders operating independently over different areas of the build platform. Ideally one would have the ability to cover the entire platform so that continuous shells could be printed for each layer but once the shell is down having multiple extruders sharing the workspace could allow for much faster infill printing and significantly reduce print times since you'd be laying down more than a single line of material at any given time. Extend that out a bit more and you could use a second extruder to print supports while the first one is printing the part. Again, doubling the amount of material being put down per unit time without speeding up the movement of the extruders. Off hand the only scenario where this could be made to work would be robotic arm type machines. Anything that has fixed carriages would have interference issues. But I'm sure there are people far more clever than me out there that could develop something like this.