Thoughts on repostpone the shipping of MultiMaterial-Upgrade  

Thoughts on repostpone the shipping of MultiMaterial-Upgrade

First Hi to everyone, I’m a “Newbie” here, I’m from Germany and this is my first post in this Forum. My English is a bit rusty, nevertheless I hope you can understand me so far.

Like perhaps many of you I also ordered a Prusa i3 MK2 along with the MultiMaterial Upgrade back at the end of January. In the meantime I splitted my Order with help from the very hardworking and cooperative Prusa Customer Service as it became more and more conceivable that the MultiMaterial-Upgrade will not be available as it was originally scheduled (by the end of February).

Many of you, me included, are, well lets say “not amused” about repeatedly postponing the MM shipping. But please keep in mind and honestly ask yourself: What do you really expect from the MM-Upgrade and thus from your Investment? An item, that occasionally and with some filaments perhaps works fine but with other filaments ruin your prints? An item that perhaps or perhaps not get your filament stuck in the extruder at each color change? An item, that perhaps marks or scratch some of your filaments causing jams but some others slide through nicely? Well, I can speak only for myself, but this isn’t what I’m expecting! For my money, I want to get an item that is mature and reliable without any need of fiddling and tweaking around to get it to work. And in my opinion, this is exactly what Josef and his team wants to achieve and they are working on it right in this moment.

In my understanding of Josef’s recent update ( http://www.prusaprinters.org/update-multimaterial-upgrade/ ) the current “last-minute-issue” is due to handling filaments with out-of-spec diameters. At this point of development process, Prusa-Team could even easily say “Out-of-spec is not our problem! Please get on Filament, that accurately meets the specification in diameter and you won’t have any problems” and push it out the door just to “satisfy” the customers. BTW I have nearly 20 years of experience working as a sales person at a big electrical supplies distributor and believe me, every manufacturer – from “Global Player” down to “nearly Unkown” – does exactly this day by day, even when they are aware of more major issues than above mentioned. BananaTech – ripes at the customers side: Nowadays that is not the exception but the rule. Therefore I am very happy that Josef and his Team obviously don’t belong to this sort of companies and they do and consider everything possible with the goal to develop a product, that is as much satisfying for us customers and as much reliable as it could be.

Of course, being put off again and again is annoying. Took it too long for Josef to state his recent MM-Update? Maybe. But I think it makes more sense that Prusa Team works on the last issues - which they do of course - as wasting time posting one update after another. With postponing the shipping again, Prusa already risks a huge amount of order cancellations and refunds. But exactly for that reason such a decision – in my opinion - is what even constitutes a trustworthy company with the focus on the best possible product quality and reliability.

I would be glad, if my “now not become so short” Post helps the one or the other to view the current situation from a slightly different angle.

Florian