Trials with Makerbot's Digitizer - Star Trek replicating soon?

It has been quite a sudden learning curve, but our intrepid in-house 3D student experimenter (Andrew Bradley) has been steadily testing and observing and improving the use of the Makerbot Digitizer that our deal-finding principal (Kenn Harvey) brought in Monday.

Andrew unboxing the digitizer

1) Straight out of the box, it produced some pretty scary blobs:

From this to this

2) then we adjusted the lighting, and found that a COMPLETE DARKNESS around the digitizer, minimizing any other light interference with the lasers, helped tremendously.

Below are the original object (on the left), an 80% sized print (center) and a 50% sized print, with the digitizer rendering below

It is still a fairly primitive copy, kind of fuzzy on the details, and a few details missed altogether (one fin is short, one side of the tail fin has gaps). But it is recognizable and fixable.

3) And here's the magic black box our resourceful principal made to block out the light (with little to no shiny tape on the inside to avoid laser reflections):

4) Our attempt at replicating digitizing and printing a copy of a calculator created new issues: the laser/camera setup cannot interpret the glass surface of the display window and light-charge windows, so it simply left them out (big holes). Kind of funny and cute. We printed a tiny replica:

Pretty fuzzy on the details and sloppy edges, but recognizable.

So it isn't a Star Trek replicator... yet. Early days, not quite ready for prime time, but the software and hardware will no doubt improve in the next few years.