Shining 3D Einstar Handheld 3D Scanner with Detail-Oriented Enhancement Technology Support Scanning Hair and Body, Up to 14FPS Scanning Speed High Quality Collecting Data 3D Scanner for 3D Printer

Let me start off by saying I am not affiliated with any scanning company. I am just a guy that measures countertops for a living....with a degree in architecture and about 20 years experience drafting / 3d modeling.I Just got the brand new Revopoint Range last week. Yes that is not this scanner but I want to give you a comparison of what you can get for a similar price. I tried scanning my bumper with tracking dots in my dimly lit apartment with the Revopoint Range and the tracking was terrible, absolute garbage. The Revopoint would just lose tracking and go into a scanning death spiral of elongated point clouds and bad data. I tried scanning many things around my apartment, if it was flat no way in hell unless it had tracking dots. Pile of clothes on the floor, kind of ok but would still lose tracking and just slap bad point cloud locations on top of good ones. Man was I disappointed. So disappointed I immediately bought this Einstar. I was so prepared to be disappointed again. I am like, it is a few years older and about the same price.... probably the same marketing BS that these Chinese scanner companies all pump out. But at least with amazon I can return it if it is crap. Wow was I surprised. Just finished my bumper scan and it was so easy! Completely professional results. Yes the tracking dots where still on there from my first attempt with the Revopoint Range.... also my bumper is dark gray shiny paint. I don't have any of the white 3d scanning powder yet. Even with all the obvious no no's of scanning = dark and shiny object in poor lighting... the tracking and scanning was amazing! It would effortlessly find where I had stopped and pick right back up if I moved around or got too close. Finally! A scanner that actually works and I don't have to sell a kidney to buy.Take a look at my bumper comparison pictures. The Range scan is pretty terrible, lots of incorrect data and took me probably 2-3 times longer to scan than with the Einstar. It drives me crazy the complete BS marketing these Chinese companies use. If you watch the Revopoint Range launch video it has a guy scanning his bright red painted sports car, no tracking dots, no white spray and has a beautiful 3d mesh model as a result. It also has a woman scanning a green couch and the finished 3d model looks amazing. There is absolutely no way that scanner can do any of that....You would need a $100k Creaform scanner to get those results. But stupid me I fell for the slick marketing and was like, well it is brand new, maybe the technology is finally trickling down and us poor folk can get something that is actually good? Hell no! It was all just a lie. But the Einstar, this scanner you could probably scan a whole car in a couple days with a ton of tracking dots and white powder scanning spray.I had a company scan a different bumper for me a few months ago. They used a Artec Leo ($30k scanner) outside in the sunlight with white spray and no tracking dots. The Artec leo literally took them 5 minutes but I would say the results are very similar. See the Einstar Vs Artec Leo comparison picture.To sum up this Einstar is simply amazing. The packaging is really professional. The software is far better than Revopoint. It really felt like I was getting a professional tool when I was opening the box and using it. As for the Revopoint I was like...man I paid $700 for this? Where the scanning technology is right now, there is no other scanner for under $1k that comes close. We are probably 5-10 years away before the technology of the metrology grade scanners that cost currently $100k make it into the consumer market. This Einstar is the perfect hobbyist tool and finally has solved a problem I have had for decades. How to easily translate the real world into the 3d world. It is something that most people will not understand. How difficult and time consuming it is to reverse engineer anything in the real world. Look at your keyboard, yeah it is a rectangle, two easy measurements there...but is it actually just a rectangle? Mine has a slightly sloped complex curve that your hands rest on. How do you measure that radius? Is it a radius?...no it is actually more like a spline....and on and on. It could take days or even weeks to hand measure something a scanner can do in seconds.If you go into 3d scanning expecting you are just going to wave around a magic wand for a couple minutes and your done....you are going to be disappointed. Just like I was with the Revopoint. But I am glad I had that experience because now I know how good this Einstar is. No it is not as easy to use as a $30,000 Artec Leo. You have to hook it up to your laptop and use tracking dots on large flat surfaces. But this Einstar gives you the best chance to get a usable 3d model at an insanely cheap price.

At first, I thought the 3D scanner was faulty, but then I discovered the brightness setting. I turn mine all the way down, and for some scans, I don’t need any brightness at all. I also recommend scanning white surfaces—they work much better than black ones, though black surfaces can be scanned with some difficulty.

Prepare to be very frustrated, the software has no tutorial, it relies on users uploading reviews on Youtube, which are there to just sell the scanner. Quirky software, does not walk the user through the process, very bad interface, and no way to know next options, be ready to waste a ton of time with this scanner and software. The scanner itself has horrible ergonomics, requiring your hand to be in an awkward position for a long period, no easy mount for a tripod. A tangle of 3 wires complicate the entire setup. The listing says great with shiny surfaces, but this is not the case. This is how devices used to be like 40 years ago before interface designers and ergonomists were involved. Einstar means one star, and even one star is probably too high a rating. Its possible other scanners are also terrible, but this is a waste of $800 dollars, will return it. Interestingly, I contacted a mechanical engineer who uses this scanner in his business, he is quite adept and experienced, and he scanned my part using this scanner, and the scan was full of artifacts, deformed edges, and the markers came out as huge raised bumps all over the scanned part, I had to spend a few hours in meshmixer to clean up the scan file removing these problems while checking I was not also changing the base shape of the part much, This is not something you want to do, so then even with an experienced user of this scanner, the quality of the end scan was quite poor.

Sixteen core i7 with an nvidia 4070 and 32gb of ram is STILL apparently not enough to make this thing track well. Small items? Forget it. Anything smaller than a brick, it doesn't seem to matter what you use for a background or surround or what kind of indexing you place around the object, the object itself just escapes the scanner's notice, which is confusing because it captures some fine details as part of larger scans that I had thought were artifacts of the process that turned out to be features I hadn't been able to resolve with my naked eye. IT CAN ACTUALLY SEE THE TEXTURE OF HARD WATER STAINS ON MY SINK BACKSPLASH AND THEY SHOW UP IN THE MESH ACCURATELY! But it can't see a mini, it can't see my phone, it can't see my coffee cup... regardless of how I frame it, whether I calibrate or not, regardless of the lighting or lack thereof in the room... and the software is kind of a major pain because it discards any conventional cues for workflow and instead uses weird breadcrumb navigation with stupid circles that may or may not take you to the next or previous stage of what you were trying to do based on arbitrary conditions that it does not express to you. It also doesn't make clear that you need to modify the data and commit some sort of action in order for it not to simply discard everything when you click that final "next" for export. Like, I can see my model in the window, I can ask it to export it, but when I give it a name for the export, it just immediately returns to the window and exports nothing. Not even a blank file, unless I first select some part of the mesh and/or delete something. Then, regardless of whether I have anything selected, export works? What am I missing? Why is this so poorly documented? Why does it feel like a Martian or Peugot engineer made this interface? It doesn't act like ANYTHING you've used before.Also, it went on sale immediately after I bought it, of course, for nearly 150 bucks less AND a can of AESUB spray...

Bought a refurb one and possible got a new one. Had a lot of isssues setting it but now it works great.