I agree with everything another responder named Yoshi said about the XEED. This is my 2nd machine, but first “non-professional” model. I bought my XEED a year ago and have become happier with it over time. However, as their highest price (except the tall Creatr) and most professional product (although, I would still classify it as a high-end hobbiyest machine) the XEED is a little disappointing as it has many has so many limitations:
1. limited materials - this is not so clear in their website materials unless you look at which models each filament is recommended for.
2. I can not get flexible to work. I will not give up, but it needs more time.
3. The ridiculous location of the usb ports (on the back).
4. The low quality VGA display.
5. The heating bed cable gets caught in the door due to completely unplanned looking location at the door front. It literally comes out of the heated chamber every time you open the door. You can not close the door without two hands. It is just that bad.
6. The heating bed is not stationary in the X-axis. You must be careful if you open the chamber during a pause in a build not to move it. Once the machine started mysteriously after finishing a job and slammed into the part that was on the bed and jackhammered the bed into the glass door.
7. There is no way to pause the machine and change the materials (simply) if you want to change color mid-build or if you run out of material during a build. You can pause the machine, but there is no simple way to run the unload/load utility so that you can just start where you left off.
8. You can’t run PVA dissolvable filament which is one great reason to get a two-head machine. In fact it is the reason I bought it, I was stupid to not figure this out ahead of time. I was disappointed that they let me buy the material as it was on the order I placed when I bought the machine. I bought 10 spools from leapfrog direct.
There are more frustrating things about this, but at $10K, I expected none of these issues.
That said, here are the positives:
1. Good mass (I think it is 180 lbs or so), so on a solid table you don’t have the same vibrating jackhammer of some mid level machines.
2. two heads, although I have to be honest, I have yet to benefit from it. Again, I wanted to run PVA with ABS to be able to drop the print in hot water and dissolve the support. Also, I wanted to run flex with ABS, but again, no luck.
3. heated bed allows good conditions for good ABS Adhesion/builds. Really nice ABS performance. This is the most impressive part of the machine as ABS is my favorite material for making dimensionally stable durable prototypes.
4. Enclosed chamber, if you work with ABS, enough said.
5. Simplify 3d is pretty good slicer software that comes with the machine. Not difficult to figure out.
6. The guys in the Netherlands are very good at responding to problems (they use a decent ticket system). They are very nice and have very good english.
7. I have not looked at machines in a while, but when I bought it, there was really no competition (two heads/good resolution/reasonably speedy/heated bed/network/wireless/good software interface/on-unit screen/robust sealed enclosure…) at this price that did not have proprietary material requirement. Other cheap/high quality machines seem to make their money on selling you over-priced cartridges. I love this about leapfrog. I have used $11-20 ABS and PLA with no real problems.
A word on what I considered to be the competition:
One competitive example is MarkForged around $6-10K also. Nice machines, but with a single head (at the time of purchase anyway). Also, the material is so expensive that if you are a steady user, you will pay more than the machine each year or two just in materials, they are 8-50x more than the Inland materials you can get at Microcenter.
All that said, I think the the lulzbot people look interesting too. If you have any more questions, please send me a question, I was very frustrated to not find more experienced XEED users when I was making my decision on which machine to get.
Thomas
