First off I’d like to thank @bailey for her hospitality this past Saturday.
My wife and I arrived @ the faire at about 9:30. We didn’t get in till about 10:15’ish and B-Lined to the GF Booth. In which I ran into @takitus, @polarbrainfreeze, @joe & @jacobturner. There was already a line for the demo cuts from the PDF that was provided beforehand. They had 2 units at the booth and the 3rd was at the Show & Tell that was starting at 10:30.
The very first observation is how big the Glowforge actually is. I KNEW the dimensions- I’ve measured the desk that its going to be placed on. But ‘IRL’ it’s pretty damn big.
The unit on the far left of the booth had some small differences from the units we have seen in the pictures. i.e. Hinge covers on the interior. It’s seems that particular unit is a early prototype? I was not able to get a straight answer about that.
Here’s a rundown of what I saw.
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Basically they ran one pre-canned demo all day. End users goes to one line to get the design sheet. Then goes into another to get it ‘scanned’ and engraved. It’s does that very well. (As long there is no wifi issues.)
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From what I’ve gather from the Show & Tell, Nothing really new was discussed.
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The demo parts for the most part are the same ones that we’ve all seen before.
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Will Smith is truly a nice guy. We talked for about 10 mins about CNCs and closed-loop systems and the future of CAD.
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The unanimous answer about the delivery date is still ‘All pre-order units in December.’ No matter how carefully I worded the question- I got the same answer.
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Beta units outside of Seattle is going to happen ‘Soon’ I truly hope one lands in VA.
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The lid on the Glowforge is weighty. The hinges will hold it’s own weight from full vertical to about 30 degrees before gravity takes over.
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The lid will be a smudge magnet. If you are OCD about people touching your monitor- have your microfiber cloth at the ready.
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The lighting in the unit is very nice. Evenly lit. Not a harsh/hard color temp.
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I am assuming the Glowforge display units where in draft/medium mode (as far as print quality) The feed rate look fairly low to me. But the cuts that it did where nice. Pictures / Video Below.
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Did I mention that the Glowforge is larger in person?
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I asked @bailey about if there will be a storage cap on end users designs in the design catalog and will there a means of exporting them if there is a limit or just for safe keeping (Remember a backup is not a backup if you keep one secondary copy of the original. Make Backups… DOOOO IT.) She said she would get back to me on that.
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I also asked if there was a means of exporting the vector that the GF Cloud makes of a image from the lid camera. She also said she’d get back to me on that.
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I asked about the filter unit. As they were not at faire. (they had a massive industrial unit for the units at the show.) I was told that they have smart people working on it and it works great. Well- Okay. Why haven’t we seen any videos of it in action? shrug
For now, Seeing a glowforge first hand has brought my spirit up a bit. But I’d still like to see a couple things in action. Greyscale rastering. Manual focus. Pass-thru functionality and duplexing. Basically anything that we have not seen before. There are quite a few new beta users out there. But the post from them seems to have slowed down.
On to the pictures and videos.
My wife asked a couple good key questions in this video.
General overview of the booth.