[mwill]

Really curious to see what the print quality ends up being like on these.

Design wise they're very similar to something like a cetus, or many other Chinese printers with similar mechanics with a major difference: Smooth rods and bearings instead of linear rails.

In my own designs I've pivoted away from rods in favor of rails and seen much greater quality, accuracy, repeatability, and speed, even with cheap knock off rails from China, and most of the industry is moving that way as well.

What's curious is you can get a machine similar to the mini, using linear rails, and more metal or injection moulded parts over 3D printed parts, for just a little bit more than the mini.

Prusa has quite a good reputation though, so I'm skeptical they would release an inferior machine at a the same price point, so like I said, really curious to see how well these works.

[dhon_]

What I love about Prusa is that they eat their own dog food. They use their printers in a farm producing parts for their products. This makes reliability and repeatability first class citizens.

He mentions in the blog post that the motivation for this was wanting smaller & cheaper machines for the farm, as two small machines can print faster than one big one for the same cost.

I'll still wait for reviews, but this looks like a great little machine and I suspect that quality will be reasonable for the above reasons.

One issue will be corrosion on the rails over time though. This affected an original Ultimaker I had sitting around as I let too much dust gather on it.