A Very Capable 3d Scanner for the Money The SOL 3D Scanner is a solid scanner. My use-case for this is a hobby interest in preserving and recreating difficult to find parts for Arcade & Pinball Machine maintenance and restoration. Often, these 35+ year old machines require specific parts from companies that no longer exist. The Sol 3D Scanner is meeting my needs but it does have some limitations, I have some nitpicks. First, the nitpicks The thumb screw placement on the scanner head is difficult to access given the mount-design unless you have the fingers of a child or north-pole elf. There are probably tripod-screw workarounds for this in the photography space. The Scanner requires two USB 3.0 connections and includes two cables. The annoying part of this is they are very short cables and they are different USB standards. The scanner head takes a USB-C and the turn-table takes a mini USB. Remember, you are snaking these cables out of a blackout tent to your computer. Why cheap out on something so simple as USB cables when it directly impacts the user experience and potential scan quality? I recommend you buy longer cables or a dedicated powered USB 3.0 hub and extension cable to go in your scanning kit to give flexibility for scanner / tent / placement. The SOL Viewer on the Mac is incredibly slow and clunky. It makes the fans on even a newer i7 Macbook Pro sound like a Marvel SHIELD Hellicarrier. I'm guessing this performance hit is a result of some sort of cross-platform or non-platform-native coding shortcuts. (Just a guess.) Fortunately, the MacOS Preview app is really quite good and lightweight for viewing models. After I initially wrote this review, I went back and tried the Windows-based SOL Creator and Viewer apps and I can confirm they appear to be more performant on the Windows platform. To be clear, there is exactly consistency in scan results between the two, the Windows version seemed to complete the computational steps in less time. (~30%) The SOL Creator app fails to align multi-positional scans maybe 25% of the time. This is sometimes attributed to object stability during the scan and sometimes due to complex object structures and finishes. I've found sometimes it is beneficial to 3d print a stand that can be easily edited out later in order to stabilize certain weirdly shaped objects. Sticky tape and putty can be useful as well. Perhaps the most substantive limitation I've found is that the Scanner requires objects to have consistent reflectivity in order to get usable scans. Makes sense given the technology but know that pitch-black and semi-transparent materials will yield inconsistent results. On the positive side.. It works and the scan-quality usually exceeded my expectations so long as I gave the models multiple passes. Some of the results have frankly surprised me at the level of detail that is picked up in the scan. Using the scanner in close-mode I've gotten some excellent and usable scans of parts that are nearly impossible for me to source. The build quality seems good. The SOL Creator software does a lot of heavy-lifting in aligning the point-clouds between multiple scans and masking out the table-base so that in most cases you end up with a usable model from its output without requiring a ton of manual post-processing. I suspect there is some solid Machine Learning at work on the backend. Compared to other scanners and price points, the SOL 3d Scanner is a solid contender. I was initially skeptical that my use-case would justify even the $700 spend on this but I've been pleasantly surprised in the myriad of uses I've found for the scanner, in just a short amount of time. It is an incredible time saver and jump-start and heck of a nice tool to have available.

The instructions leave a little to be desired The instructions leave a little to be desired. I had to do a fair amount of researching to find ou how to best use the scanner, including how to adjust from far to near. The tips that occaisionally show up on screen while waiting for number crunching to occur are useful but should be in the instruction book in the first place. As for the hardware, I give it an enthusiastic 2 thumbs up.

Very good 3d scanner Very good 3d scanner, i have other scanner that are way more expensive than this, and the quality of scanned object are same, the only difference of this scanner from the more expensive one is the time of each scann and mesh to take, sol software are excellent maybe can be upgraded so the time of each scann and mash to improve and maybe add a function to edit/cut the scann object. Other than that i recommend to get this scanner.

Can’t seem to get it to scan anything… Can’t seem to get it to scan anything right except the duck that came with it. Will try again but seriously thinking of returning it.

Excellent product for an excellent… Excellent product for an excellent price! do 3 or more scans to get better results.