My experience after four days of E1 child care
I need to write this down and share my story with using the E1 in the last four days since I started it the first time. While it is totally fun to use and the results can be very great, the overall user experience is kind of terrible.
All of this actually was to be expected based on the experience with the ordering process in the first place. I waited nearly 7 month to receive my device that was supposed to be delivered 2 month after my order. All this while sometimes not having a clue if I would receive my device at all, because the communication and information on when to actually expect the device to arrive was kind of cryptic.
Now that I finally found the time to start the journey, I am quite disillusioned after just four days of using the E1.
Don't get me wrong: if it works, the E1 is so much fun. It's fresh and new and the possibilities are endless. But that's just while it is actually working.
And not being complicated or cryptic or being buggy and surprising me with ever new errors and disfunctionalities and crashes and bad software and maintenance efforts that you are told to do (that in the end don't really are that necessary as it is communicated) and panic to end in a clogged printhead worth a quarter of the device and insufficient ink supplies and dealing with toxic (or not so toxic, who knows. Cryptic communication again) etc. etc.
I get connection errors, not detected print beds, errors regarding missing cartridges of all kind that aren't missing and are only two days and some prints old, a software that drains cpu and ram, complete system shutdowns and crashes out of the blue while it is doing nothing with no chance to solve it but to unplug the device which you should NEVER do according to the manual and then again get told to do exactly this by the support and by the software itself. I even got notifications to my mobile phone at night about the device suddenly being dead.
I had to contact the support three times in four days with a wait time of up to 24 hours for a response thinking "okay, it will be clogged before they will answer", because my device actually just stopped working completely without any chance to restart.
Every breakdown costs ink for cleaning and calibration afterwards and nervs and time and removes excitement.
I really wonder if I just received a bad device or if this is the overall experience of other users, too. Because the reviews and youtube vids just speak a totally different language.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to be able to love this device. It is so tremendously great to even be able to UV print as a "prosumer" at all. But it feels like a beta-state device if not alpha-state sometimes. That's okay, I am quite a experimental-tech-affine guy. But the E1 is expensive, the ink is, the addons are. And it really doesn't meet the expactions one has when buying stuff with a 2.5+k pricetag.
But I don't love it... and if I do, then it's more of a "Hassliebe" as we germans say...
Sorry, long text, but I needed to get this of my chest :-)