Hi everyone,
As some of you may have seen there has been a new rather controversial company pop up in the community. L00P is a new company advertising their new magical desktop filament production tool. Apparently is is supposed to grind up the filament and extrude it all for the low price of $100 ($100 is the pre-order price, $141 seems to be the normal price).
But as a lot of people have pointed out this seems FAR too good to be true. Another similar product which already exists and had been around for a couple of years now is the Filament Maker One by 3devo. But it STARTS at about $7000, so how the $@%^ are you meant to be getting something for around $100.
There was a lot of skepticism regarding the fact that there had been no actual pictures of the product either, there had only been 3d renders of the machine. And this was the final nail in the coffin for me, like my dad always said, if it seems too good to be true it probably is.
But that all changed the other day when I saw this, an actual introduction to the team behind the project and a demonstration of the machine in use!!!
Now this product really has me scratching my head, all of my sense of reasoning (or whatever is left at this point) is telling me that there is no way that this is real. But now this video has me wondering a little bit, if these guys are willing to make a video, put their names on it, and show the machine functioning in a one take shot maybe there is something to this…
What do you all think, I am 100% not putting down a deposit on one of these things, as soon as I see that cnc kitchen or teaching tech or 3D Printing Nerd or anyone notable in this space has their hands on one maybe I will consider it.
Thoughts?
My gut feeling is no I think it is a real product.
Loop makes big pro machines.
The very long demo video is crude and has long sequences of the thing running. Too long to be cg.
It is hard to say.
I absolutely agree that the product itself it real, the video has convinced me of that. Where I really struggle is the price of this thing, I just can’t figure out a way that this company would be selling these machine for this price without a massive loss.
I figure one of 3 things is going on.
- They do have a model of this product that exists, but they have no intention of actually selling it. They are just trying to take peoples money and run. Although it seems a bit silly it would be such a small amount, they could have easily charged more for this thing and people still would buy it.
- They will be offering some sort of subscription based model in order to actually use it, this is becoming more and more common these days, although I can’t for the life of me figure out how one would insert a subscription into a filament extruder.
- This thing does in fact happen to be real and this company has figured out some miracle way to produce these machines for an incredibly low price.
My gut tells me it is door number 1, although I am incredibly hopeful for door number 3. Too many times we have seen this exact same situation, amazing new invention for a low price which never ends up being delivered.
Also where did you see about their other products, I have not heard of any other products which they have produced. I do know of LOOP (different to L00P) who produces industrial machines, is this who you are thinking of?
Yes loop whom makes SLS printers big ones. Are they not the same group? If they are loop but not associated with Loop that is a huge red flag. If they are not the same, it is shocking there is not a court case. The names are too close. That would make me question if the filament recycler people are a real company.
If they are the same its unlikely a cut and run.
It seems legit to a point and watching a working model run seems reasonable. I didn’t see a price on the web site just a sign up for a discount. Hard to know.
Yes the loop you are thinking of is spelled with 2 letter O’s, whereas the loop in question here replaces the 2 O’s in the name with Numerical Zero’s.
In terms of the price I took another look at their pricing page and I was definitely mistaken. When I read it first I took it to mean that the final price of the unit currently was $100, meaning that at a 41% discount the normal price would be $141. But now I do definitely see that I was mistaken. So I guess depending on the price it could very well be a real product, the price was my biggest sore spot with the product.
I think at around probably the $1000 range they could make something with a pretty reasonable usability that would still be profitable for the company.
I am definitely invested in this now, and I am interested to see where it ends up going.
