Gadgetory

hi I'm rich brown senior editor for cnet today we're going to take a look at the affinia h series H 479 3d printer so of the three 3d printers I reviewed so far this one is my favorite it's not necessarily perfect but it's fast it's easy to use and overall it's generally more reliable than the others i've tested so the h 479 sells for about sixteen hundred bucks it's still probably in the hobbyist category it's not quite as powerful as some other printers out there but it is still expensive so you really have to kind of be committed to the idea of experimenting with 3d printing in order to buy this thing now like most of the 3d printers it uses what's called ABS plastic that's a kind of material here it's a plastic filament runs down through a heated extruder head here and a deposits material down to this build platform and forms it up into a model that you sent to it from either a Windows PC or Mac now if you look closely you might see some parts in this printer that look a little janky the cover here is a plastic clip on the back and the support arm for the spool of filament are all made from 3d printed plastic it might look a little cheap but there's no problems with functionality now the printer ships with ABS plastic which is a kind of material used for 3d printing and also can support PLA as well as some experimental stuff if you're willing to try it now affinia suggest you don't use spools from other vendors but we had no problem testing spools for MakerBot as well as a couple other places now you see the build platform isn't all that big compared to some other 3d printers likes a MakerBot replicator this one lets you print models about 5 inches cubed which is a decent size but there probably will be some things you'll find that just won't fit on the platform now you might also notice the binder clips on this platform which seem kind of cheap we agree but they also kind of hold the secret to this printer and why we like it so much so if you take the binder clips off we can then lift off this plate which is called a perf board now the idea behind the perf board is that it makes it much easier for prints to actually stick to the build platform when it's printing with the perf board it's not a perfect solution you still have to do some post processing notre to really get a good print but with it you have no doubt that your print is going to stick to the platform and stay in place while it's printing they come out a little bumpy do the pork board because there's holes here and then when you print the plastic kind of sticks in there so really have to kind of work to dislodge the object and then clean it up after you take it off the platform now I have a few objects here you can see look a little rough but they all more or less look as intended also there accurately printed and they work and kind of move as I expected them to what's also nice is that affinia gives you the tools you need to pry it off the platform and give it a rough cleanup you can still do some more finishing to really get it looking nice now lastly I'll talk about it Phineas software which strikes a nice balance between ease of use and deep configurability it's not quite as granular some of the really deep settings you get them certain printers but overall it gives you nice control over objects in terms of their quality the amount of material you want to use in the inside but in general it lets you use a printer with a good degree of control of an output but without giving you sort of the depth and craziness of engineering level software so the H 479 is not as powerful as some other printers out there that cost two or three thousand dollars that only prints one color it has a relatively small build platform but overall it's easy to use and it's fast you have to give your objects a little bit of TLC after they print but overall they look as intended now this is still expensive enough that you really have to want to be involved in 3d printing to buy this thing but it strikes a nice balance between usability and output quality that it's really easy to recommend so I'm rich brown this is the affinia h-series h 479