If your lens is installed correctly (they can be installed upside down) and your optics don’t need cleaning, then the problem is most likely with a lack of resolution in the source file.
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Ugh. This makes me frustrated. We never got snapmarks and then they were killed. So I’m not so excited anymore. Maybe when I get back from vaca and use the machine it’ll have it activated, but this whole idea of announcing it like some super awesome thing when it’s just a randomly selected closed beta is kinda lousy.
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I’m pretty sure everyone is getting it. The way I interpret dan’s message is if someone finds a serious bug early on, we’ve decided it’s easier to roll it back if we slowly roll it out. Or they are afraid customer support will be overwhelmed by a big dump of a complex feature.
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I don’t have much reason to take the best possible interpretation, here. If it turns out that way, I’ll be pleased, but I am not going to rely on it as a certainty.
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Would love to have this feature now, not sure what warrants an announcement email saying “Your Glowforge got faster overnight!” when the truth is I will have to wait until who knows when for this feature to actually come through…
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Great to receive an email saying my Glowforge is faster. Not so great to click it on and off periodically to see that I haven’t received the new features.
Surely if you possess the technical acumen to develop a web application based laser product, you also possess the ability to send emails to people once they’ve received the firmware, rather than a bulk shotgun blast.
You all will have to forgive me. I’m still salty about the poor management on the snapmarks feature.
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I wouldn’t make this assumption, they don’t have the ability to know when one’s GlowForge has shipped yet. 
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I’m sure it would be a lovely scenario when people say, my Glowforge got faster, and other people say, what about me!?
It’s a can’t win situation. Why not just be happy that it’s coming?
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Having gotten a chance to try this all out in the beta, I just want to thank @dan and the Glowforge teams for continuing to take such excellent care of their early adopters. There’s a little bit of something for everyone with the speed increases, the engrave in margin enhancements, and the corner cleanup, which was something many of the early adopters wanted very badly. (You just keep continuing to impress.) 
Thank you team!
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Apple doesn’t do this when rolling out app updates, nor does Google.
As an example, I’m patiently waiting for dark mode in gmail for iOS, rather than posting snarky comments on their community forum.*
I’m still astounded (among other things) that updates announcing improvements and upgrades are met with petty complaints. Every. Fricking. Time.
*I’m aware of the irony of this statement. It’s a fair cop. 
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true that
Snapmarks were announced from the start as an experimental feature that wasn’t being promised.
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Just occurred to me that the much faster speeds means we laser more material per minute and therefore have quicker buildup - equals sooner cleaning and maintenance? I faithfully write down the length of every job and I tend to have to do the maintenance clean between 33 and 38 production hours. I never make it to 40 as recommended as there will be subtle signs to say it is cleaning time. Does this significant upgrade means more debris in less time? Has 
staff done any tracking on this?
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Faster means less energy deposited on the material, so less combustion. It also means you cover more material so while it is less smoke per given area you have smoke from more area. Are they equivalent? Who knows. Also, different materials release different size particles and size in clogging filters matter. It is also possible faster means less complete combustion, that could mean less smoke but larger particles or maybe it means smaller particles. What I’m saying is your tracking is fabulous, but there are too many variables, the values of which aren’t well enough known, to figure things out that accurately.
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A heavy vs. light engrave could produce orders of magnitude more particulates, and different materials could make huge differences as well (look at the people reporting full filters after just a few sheets of material.)
There’s simply no way to know, but if you find for the same jobs you need to clean after 37 hrs, and the new speeds cut your job time in half, then you would expect to clean after half the usual time.
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I hear you, but they definitely could have worded that email better. Being faced with “Your Glowforge just got up to 4x as fast” as the subject line, only to read father down that it’ll be over the next week or so just rubs the wrong way
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If they are the posts I’m thinking of, those people either aren’t using the new settings or don’t even have the update. They are jumping to conclusions that it’s a software issue. If you don’t have a margins option, then you aren’t using the margin feature, which is the only one that is going to vary the power along the accel/decel areas.
It’s not really fair to post this as something that sounds like fact - because it’s not.
The posts from Michael and Claudio today, with the raster engrave of “Coach” on leather tags, and the raster photos on wood? They both said it happens on raster engraves, regardless of which file/design they use, regardless of number of passes, only in the left and right margins of the engrave, and only started after the new update rolled out. Neither of them said they don’t have the new options. Is that not the two?
Yes. One of them spoke to me privately and I can assure you that at least one of them (Michael) doesn’t even have the software update yet.
If this were an instance of the software applying this behavior on any kind of widespread basis, we would have an absolute ton of reports.
As for Claudio, he said Proofgrade does exactly as expected.
Settings in existing designs, or defaults for PG materials, have not changed to use the new higher speeds.
Also, the “turn around” time at high speeds results in a reduction of printable area, it only prints in the (reduced) area where it is running at the set speed.