Received my first print purchased from Shapeways. The designer had done an amazing job recreating the object at 1:12 scale. Was excited to prep and paint the print to customize a figure. What I received is a print where more than 50% of the detail was marred by the manufacturing process (verified by Shapeways). In the communication from Shapeways it was stated that the marring is an "expected result and can't be improved". Shapeways should not be touting Smooth Fine Detail Plastic as a premium material that "showcases fine and intricate details" without also stating that the printing process will in fact mar the "fine and intricate detail". The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I've uploaded photos to my original post. At this point I'm a bit baffled. Shapeways believes that this is the "expected result and can't be improved". The seller/designer believes it might have been printed at an incorrect "angle". I reached out to the person who recommended the seller/designer to me and who has purchased several prints (including the same one pictured above); he provided pictures of the prints, all were perfect, none having the issues that mine do. As it stands Shapeways has made an "exception and issued a reprint" but are "quite certain the same results will occur".
Those white spots are where the support wax is touching the print on the underside. As you can't print something in midair, and you don't want to deal with a support structure, this is unavoidable. However, some prints are looking better and some are worse. I guess it depends on the particular machine, its settings and more important the batch of the raw material they use. As someone who is trained as a professional model maker, i know how different two of the same canns of liquid resin, from the same manufacturer and even the same batch can be. There are variables you really can't control, like the temperature the canns get when transported or the air humidity on the day of the print, that can drastically change the outcome. There is nothing an employee at Shapeways can do about this. It's in the designer's responsibility to design and orient the part in a way this doesn't bother too much. On a home printer, you would need to put a support structure underneath your part, that after removal will leave you also with a surface that is not the same quality as the top side.
A smattering of thoughts: As a professional business Shapeways should be able to manage their work environment from print to print, machine to machine, and day to day accounting for and properly adjusting to nuances due to humidity or formulation. This is inherently the responsibility of a professional and is commonly referred to as 'quality control'. No business should be able to say quality is high on Tuesday and low on Wednesday and expect the customer to accept that without any ability to influence which day their work is completed on. Shapeways and the Designer are acting as a unified entity and therefore recourse should be unified. It is not the customers responsibility to find and assign blame, only to raise an issue with the expectation that resolution is possible. Further to that the policy should ultimately provide protection for the customer, not just the business. In this instance each business partner denies culpability while the customer remains unserved and out of pocket. The customer did not receive what was promised. A mechanism must be available to account for such instances, one that provides a no additional cost refund to the customer.