Zortrax M200- Review

After planning it for almost two years, my friend Mauro recently opened a store in Milan called Solid3DPrintingand, of the first 3D printers he decided to carry, he started with the Italian brand Gimax and the Polish brand Zortrax. I had heard good things about Zortrax’s M200 3D printer, so, while he was waiting for his display model to arrive, I decided to contact the company to see if there was a chance to test one out.

I was not sure if they would reply, since they have reached a certain amount of notoriety after they closed a very large deal with Dell computers; and I did not know if they were still too busy filling the orders. Instead, they replied right away and were very proactive in setting up the shipping of the review unit. This was good for them, since I can easily say that I have never tried a 3D printer as efficient, reliable, solid, and capable of achieving such a high print quality as the Zortrax M200.

I will say, right away, that, in my opinion, this is the best professional-level 3D printer I have ever tried and I am amazed that it costs only €2,212 (including sales taxes). The M200 is ideal for any small professional studio and can easily rival with much more expensive Stratasys systems, in terms of print repeatability and reliability. It could truly be a game changer, as it requires no skills whatsoever to start printing; most of the settings (material, speed, plate and extruder temperature) need not (and cannot) be modified so anyone can start printing high quality parts right away.

Once the machine arrives, all you have to do is take it out of the box, follow the guided setup procedure, which includes inserting the magnetic build plate and the filament, to, then, let the machine calibrate the plate through the fully automated procedure. Zortrax sends out its 3D printer along with the most complete toolkit I have seen, with gloves, goggles, pliers and many more accessories. The guided procedure also prompts users to always wear gloves when handling the machine, which is somewhat funny. Inserting the filament and printing the first object present in the supplied SD Card is only a matter of minutes.

There is little doubt that this is an excellent 3D printer that it is definitely worth its price; however, I feel that, in a review, it is useful that I point out those features that could be improved. The first one is the software. Getting the Mac version of Z-Suite to run is very complex, and I am still not entirely sure how I did it. Sure, Zortrax’s users are probably mostly Windows adopters, but the Mac installation procedure requires downloading and installing the Mono framework, and, even then, it did not work right away.

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