3d scanners under $1000 worth the money?

[steveseers]

I just bought a BQ Ciclop kit which is about the cheapest scanner on the market right now.
I can get a decent looking point cloud with it but I'm finding it hard to convert it to a useable mesh for 3D printing.
As said above, the software for this doesn't seem quite there yet.

have you tried meshlab ? or what software do you use to mesh the pc ?

[scobo]

have you tried meshlab ? or what software do you use to mesh the pc ?

I'm using Meshlab and Cloudcompare but neither is giving me a mesh that looks good enough to 3D print.
Having said that, if I try to set the reconstruction quality much higher than the default, I get out of memory error messages or the program hangs.
My laptop is an i5 with 4GB ram.
Maybe a more powerful computer and/or graphics card is needed for better results ??