This Melody Chamlee does not know what she is talking about. I am a user of the NextEngine and it is a piece of garbage. 90 seconds of scanning doesn't get you anything. Thanks for republishing the NextEngine brochure Melody, great job, hope you come to your senses and actually use a product before you get a company or god forbid, an individual, to waste their money on this.

Dave, I use the next engine scanner regularly, and I believe it it nothing less than amazing. I use many high-end scanners and this one outperforms most of them, including the $40k HandyScan and the $90k Minolta. About the closest thing to the Next Engine (performance wise) in our arsenal is the GOM ATOS, which is accurate, but you certainly have to pay for it. And of course, you don't get any texture data with the GOM.

In our tests, the Next Engine system actually captured more data per scan due to having a smaller angular difference between the laser and imager.

From what I've gathered online, Next Engine's biggest problem is the fact thar their price-point makes the technology available to lots of scanner noobies, who don't know a good thing when they see it!

Comments like yours, Dave, anen't so much against the Next Engine scanner, as much as 3D scanners in general, since their's is one of the best on the market (at any price).

I'm a bit late to note this thread of google bait, but I have to say, I find comments that use the writer's name as the subject instead of being about anything actually mentioned in the post to be a bit underwhelming.

If someone wants to talk shop, I challenge them. Be aware that some of us will reply with relevant details to back us up.

I've taken enough engineer-level 3D modeling courses to know what it's like to render a part to tolerance so that a bridge won't buckle and a bolt won't strip. I could deliver a series of blue prints to this day, done via the old school method of the math and the keyboard commands in AutoCAD, where much of the 3D had to be constructed and understood in your head before you played with it in the software.

Newer drafting applications are more forgiving of scanning in an approximation and refining the design from there. You won't get the dreaded AutoCAD intersection error messages. The hardware and software are finally a good fit in professional modeling. For mid-level 3D art commercial production, where a bolt doesn't actually have to hold a real bridge, use of scanners for approximation is even easier.

Granted, that's a bit dry informationally for anyone who hasn't created technical drafting documents at a professional level, but since someone asked, there you go.

Phillip is correct in that you generally get what you pay for. As we paid nothing for Dave's comment I don't feel put out much, except to marvel at what some people will try to scan, and thus panic over when it takes longer than ninety seconds to find the target. I don't suppose the hardware developers realized such a lengthy stationary pose would itself pose such a challenge to some of their users.