The ways that printing and 3d printing are cursed feel different, to me.
My expectation is that if I manage to give a printer any instructions at all, it usually prints the thing I expect. If not, it’s usually because it’s out of paper or (more rarely) ink/toner. If it has raw materials and receives instructions, I expect it to print a document that looks substantially like I expect. But “trying to give it any instructions at all” may well be an exercise in frustration.
With my 3d printer, giving it instructions hasn’t been the hard part. (It’s maybe not quite straightforward. You need a microSD card, formatted correctly, with a .gcode file, and I can see those feeling cursed to someone, but they’re the kinds of problems I know how to solve. Then you put the card in the printer and select it using the sufficiently-intuitive interface on the printer.) The hard part is that the instructions I give it don’t reliably result in a physical artifact that looks or functions like I intended. Airflow, ambient temperature, properties of my filament, bed adhesion, calibration. There’s too much that can vary in the environment, and those differences can mean I need to give my printer slightly different instructions (like different nozzle or bed temperature, more supports, slower speed).
2d printers, in my experience, seem to have solved that kind of problem. Though I imagine professional printers have exciting problems that I don’t.
(John’s blank page 1 is an admittedly weird case here, but “printing a blank page” is still less surprising than, say, “oops, near the top of the page I printed a black area that was too large, and that caused the paper to skip 3mm up higher than the printer thought it was, to fix that next time I need to make sure the printer slows down in that area, or inject some subtle yellow dots”.)
(Maybe part of the difference here is “printing at some point on the paper is independent of printing at some other point”? There might be calibration errors, that mean every point is slightly offset or slightly the wrong color, but because they affect everywhere equally I’m unlikely to notice them. And there might be random errors, where ink is fired slightly too late and a specific red dot is in slightly the wrong place. But I don’t expect that red dot to cause the next line to also be in the wrong place. With a 3d printer, a missing or unexpected bit of plastic causes the next bit of plastic to be in an unexpected place too, so the random errors compound, sometimes into a goopy blob. Part of the point of printing a skirt is to avoid this: the perimeter of the first layer is some of the most likely plastic to be not-where-expected, but if it’s in a skirt it doesn’t get printed on top of so that’s okay.)
The ways that printing and 3d printing are cursed feel different, to me.
My expectation is that if I manage to give a printer any instructions at all, it usually prints the thing I expect. If not, it’s usually because it’s out of paper or (more rarely) ink/toner. If it has raw materials and receives instructions, I expect it to print a document that looks substantially like I expect. But “trying to give it any instructions at all” may well be an exercise in frustration.
With my 3d printer, giving it instructions hasn’t been the hard part. (It’s maybe not quite straightforward. You need a microSD card, formatted correctly, with a .gcode file, and I can see those feeling cursed to someone, but they’re the kinds of problems I know how to solve. Then you put the card in the printer and select it using the sufficiently-intuitive interface on the printer.) The hard part is that the instructions I give it don’t reliably result in a physical artifact that looks or functions like I intended. Airflow, ambient temperature, properties of my filament, bed adhesion, calibration. There’s too much that can vary in the environment, and those differences can mean I need to give my printer slightly different instructions (like different nozzle or bed temperature, more supports, slower speed).
2d printers, in my experience, seem to have solved that kind of problem. Though I imagine professional printers have exciting problems that I don’t.
(John’s blank page 1 is an admittedly weird case here, but “printing a blank page” is still less surprising than, say, “oops, near the top of the page I printed a black area that was too large, and that caused the paper to skip 3mm up higher than the printer thought it was, to fix that next time I need to make sure the printer slows down in that area, or inject some subtle yellow dots”.)
(Maybe part of the difference here is “printing at some point on the paper is independent of printing at some other point”? There might be calibration errors, that mean every point is slightly offset or slightly the wrong color, but because they affect everywhere equally I’m unlikely to notice them. And there might be random errors, where ink is fired slightly too late and a specific red dot is in slightly the wrong place. But I don’t expect that red dot to cause the next line to also be in the wrong place. With a 3d printer, a missing or unexpected bit of plastic causes the next bit of plastic to be in an unexpected place too, so the random errors compound, sometimes into a goopy blob. Part of the point of printing a skirt is to avoid this: the perimeter of the first layer is some of the most likely plastic to be not-where-expected, but if it’s in a skirt it doesn’t get printed on top of so that’s okay.)