Tiertime have generally excelled at making plug and play 3D printers. The UP Mini 3 has me lost.
It’s not listed as a printer in UP Studio 2.0 so effectively isn’t supported in the stable release. UP Studio 3 is very buggy and difficult to use, it took me an hour to figure out how to send a print without having to save a task file since the option was greyed out and there is no support. Additionally some settings will be randomly greyed out with no explanation why. When using any custom material it always says “no matching parameters”, the printer will print with those settings but I only knew when reading a forum post that effectively said to ignore the warning. Nothing I do gets rid of this warning with custom profiles. This feels like a piece of software from 2012.
Historically Tiertime have only ever added features to UP Studio during a new printer release and then maybe once in between printer releases, most updates are months between and usually only fix bugs not feature updates. It has me very worried about my ongoing experience with this printer. UP Studio 3 seemed like an exciting next step but it is incredibly difficult, not stable and rarely updated.
To keep this printer inline with other modern machines, Tiertime should put all efforts to allow users to slice with Cura, it is more stable, well documented, better supported and updated far more frequently than Tiertimes software. It will solve a lot of issues that people have with Tiertime printers and will allow people to get more out of their machines.
UP Studio 2 is the only stable release and in terms of recent updates it was updated once in 2022 and once in 2019. UP Studio 3 was announced in 2020 and is still only in Beta, despite multiple new printer releases which rely on the software. The last update was in November.
Even Bambulab, a company that has been in the market for far less time than Tiertime they have released two software updates in December, two in November, and one update each month between July and September. This is achieved by forking an open source software, so they don’t need to develop each feature in-house.