Is There Trouble At Ortur Laser?

First of all I’m going to start by saying these are solely my opinions. But I think they are pretty valid observations. In the last month or so the original founder of Ortur laser, Mr. Justin Tan dropped a letter saying that he and his Board couldn’t resolve their differences so he resigned.

Anyone following Ortur laser, especially on their Official Facebook group knows that the face of the company is a gentleman named Gil Araújo. He is their Support Lead and quite frankly he’s developed a reputation for providing exceptional customer service. If you’ve spent more than a few days on their group you know who he is and you know that most of their customers recognize him as a professional who is going to get them through whatever support issue they have. Gil just dropped a post announcing his resignation as well.

What Now?

Everyone knows that everyone can be replaced. Including an owner. But that doesn’t mean that it is a good look for the company. Direction of the company seemed to be the larger issue as evidenced in both gents resignation posts. Let’s talk about that direction.

Direction

The Awful LM3 Series

While I loved the LM2, in my opinion the LM3 was a gigantic swing and a miss. The laser sits too low, the frame doesn’t possess the rigidity it really needs. Also, the low hanging X motor prevents material pass through from the sides. Their correction to this was a set of $80 legs to raise the frame. Raising the frame with those Eiffel Tower looking legs makes them lose their advertised fast speeds.

While the machine has wifi and can be app controlled that comes at the expense of it broadcasting an open TELNET and FTP server. Click that link to read my blog on the subject. Boo, hiss. A network security nightmare if ever there were one.

Now that they finally got around to releasing a 20 watt laser head WAY LATE TO THE GAME, they are hanging it on the same LM3 frame. Hanging a larger laser module on a frame that is already too low and not rigid enough simply is an epic design error in a lot of ways.

Speaking From Experience

I owned an LM3 LE for a while and it had some significant quality control issues. I worked through my issues with the aforementioned support guy Gil who ordered the right parts for me and their shipping department sent some entirely different parts. Also it took them a couple of months to get around to me. It made me so angry that I sold the LM3 LE to someone locally. I should say that person is using the LM3 LE to good effect and making a few bucks with it. All I can say is the new owner should be glad the LaserOG™ (me, that’s me) owned it first and made the machine right.

That leaves me with a Laser Master 3. And I have the whole rig. Rotary, rotary chuck, extension legs to lift the machine, and an enclosure. I do have to say it is dependable, but once again I had to make the machine right. It also had quality control issues. I had to run a tap through the frame for the belt tensioning mechanism. Damn frame came with stripped threads.

What’s The Plan Stan?

The plan seems to be to take the same shitty frame design and slap a larger laser on it. Also I still read plenty of quality assurance related issues on their Facebook and Reddit discussions. And while taking this God awful approach they seem to have lost the best laser support guy on planet Earth. Brilliant!

My Conclusions

This is a recipe for disaster. What once was an up and coming laser company who could have dominated every other manufacturer is now relegated to hanging their hat on an awful design with known quality control and network security issues. “Let’s take this piece of shit and hang a larger, and heavier laser on it. That should fix it”.

Bah.

I’m speaking for myself here but I’m going to sell my LM3 rig. I can see where this is headed. The only way I’ll ever come back is if the LM4 (no such animal now) is an innovative home run. However, innovation doesn’t seem to be the strong point at Ortur. Every other company out there has lapped them, some a couple of times.

The LaserOG strongly recommends staying away from Ortur offerings until they right this sinking ship.