Im a Demis Newbie, Im really good at C@!^pso, what should i know......

I went through training for Calypso, and ran a Zeiss CMM for about six months while we had it in-house for a demo. Ultimately, I chose Brown&Sharpe CMMs for our company as Calypso couldn't support our factory automation goals. Overall, PC-DMIS is a more open-ended system than Calypso. You can measure pretty much anything, though more complex tasks my require you have good command of trigonometry and Euclidean geometry.

All that said, this is probably my best comparison of the two:

Calypso is a more polished product, similar to an Apple computer, but it does tie your hands at times. PC-DMIS, like Windows, is a bit rougher around the edges, but you have a lot more freedom so long as you can figure out how to use it.

I DO sorta like the flexibility of the articulating head (Although I do question the accuracy).

I'm with you there, that's why a majority of the machines I've purchased have fixed heads. We try to use star styli configurations for accessing features as much as possible, even on machines with an articulating head. I've never been able to recognize a distinguishable difference in accuracy, but I do get nervous when I have a large scanning probe and long stylus swinging around on the machine.

I DO like the resistance to breakage due to the probes being held together by magnets and the TP20 range of motion.

If you're not breaking things, you're not trying hard enough!

I DO NOT like the heavy use of individual "Hits" instead of the scanning head on the Vast Xt (On my B&S that’s a different attachment)

Using touch point measurements is generally more accurate than scanning, so long you use proper technique (quantity and distribution of measurement points). Scanning collects more data, which is great for evaluating form, but introduces its own distortion artifacts which reduces accuracy. That said, we use scanning religiously where I work due to form requirements (mostly roundness) on our parts. The more form deviation that is expected on a feature of a part, the more points you will need to evaluate the feature.

I DO NOT like that you can’t just qualify all the probes in the rack at once, you have to open different files and qualify the probes used in that file, then open another file and qualify those probes...... and so on. (To better explain, the qualifications seem to be tied to programs, instead of being a machine function)

You can add a tip qualification as a command into a program. We have "auto calibration" programs we run every shift that qualifies all standard styli builds on our machines, and then checks a ring gage with all of the tips. Just search for "auto calibrate", "auto calibration", "auto qualification", or similar terms here on this forum.

I DO NOT like the use of “move” or “clearplane” points, in Calypso the probe just moves in and out of the part between features pretty much automatically.

This has been a fairly fundamental difference between PC-DMIS and Calypso until very recently. The newest version, PC-DMIS 2012, has added the ability to build a "clearance cube" around your workpiece, which functions almost identically to Calypso. Clearance planes are similar, though they only work in one plane rather than as a cube around the part. That said, I prefer move points, largely due to my back ground as a CNC programmer.

I DO NOT like the Stability of the Demis platform (see all the threads in here about unexplained shutdowns and program crashes).

There's more to this than just PC-DMIS. I have worked closely with my IT department to make our PCs as stable as possible. We set up one new PC, with a clean install of just Windows 7 and PC-DMIS, and ran a CMM with it for a few months. When everything was working good, we made an image of that PC and copied onto new PCs for all our other CMMs. There's no extra junk like an ERP, timeclock, email, or anything else that could cause an application conflict. We get maybe one crash per month at most, which is actually better than I've had with Calypso on some workstations.

That said, we have one manual CMM on our shop floor, which our old IT guy tried to lock down as much as possible. You can't even right click anywhere, save files anywhere, etc. It crashes every few minutes. I believe the majority of its problems are permissions.

PC-DMIS is a big program, with a massive amount of registry entries tied to it, and files stored in lots of places (including places Microsoft says you're not supposed to put things). Like many large applications for niche markets, there's not going to be same resources behind development and testing as there is with say Solidworks, CATIA or Photoshop. I think everyone needs to try CNC programming with Esprit before they're allowed to complain about PC-DMIS.

...and I have all my years of experience in Zeiss Calypso.

That's okay, we forgive you.

I went through training for Calypso, and ran a Zeiss CMM for about six months while we had it in-house for a demo. Ultimately, I chose Brown&Sharpe CMMs for our company as Calypso couldn't support our factory automation goals. Overall, PC-DMIS is a more open-ended system than Calypso. You can measure pretty much anything, though more complex tasks my require you have good command of trigonometry and Euclidean geometry.

All that said, this is probably my best comparison of the two:

Calypso is a more polished product, similar to an Apple computer, but it does tie your hands at times. PC-DMIS, like Windows, is a bit rougher around the edges, but you have a lot more freedom so long as you can figure out how to use it.

I DO sorta like the flexibility of the articulating head (Although I do question the accuracy).

I'm with you there, that's why a majority of the machines I've purchased have fixed heads. We try to use star styli configurations for accessing features as much as possible, even on machines with an articulating head. I've never been able to recognize a distinguishable difference in accuracy, but I do get nervous when I have a large scanning probe and long stylus swinging around on the machine.

I DO like the resistance to breakage due to the probes being held together by magnets and the TP20 range of motion.

If you're not breaking things, you're not trying hard enough!

I DO NOT like the heavy use of individual "Hits" instead of the scanning head on the Vast Xt (On my B&S that’s a different attachment)

Using touch point measurements is generally more accurate than scanning, so long you use proper technique (quantity and distribution of measurement points). Scanning collects more data, which is great for evaluating form, but introduces its own distortion artifacts which reduces accuracy. That said, we use scanning religiously where I work due to form requirements (mostly roundness) on our parts. The more form deviation that is expected on a feature of a part, the more points you will need to evaluate the feature.

I DO NOT like that you can’t just qualify all the probes in the rack at once, you have to open different files and qualify the probes used in that file, then open another file and qualify those probes...... and so on. (To better explain, the qualifications seem to be tied to programs, instead of being a machine function)

You can add a tip qualification as a command into a program. We have "auto calibration" programs we run every shift that qualifies all standard styli builds on our machines, and then checks a ring gage with all of the tips. Just search for "auto calibrate", "auto calibration", "auto qualification", or similar terms here on this forum.

I DO NOT like the use of “move” or “clearplane” points, in Calypso the probe just moves in and out of the part between features pretty much automatically.

This has been a fairly fundamental difference between PC-DMIS and Calypso until very recently. The newest version, PC-DMIS 2012, has added the ability to build a "clearance cube" around your workpiece, which functions almost identically to Calypso. Clearance planes are similar, though they only work in one plane rather than as a cube around the part. That said, I prefer move points, largely due to my back ground as a CNC programmer.

I DO NOT like the Stability of the Demis platform (see all the threads in here about unexplained shutdowns and program crashes).

There's more to this than just PC-DMIS. I have worked closely with my IT department to make our PCs as stable as possible. We set up one new PC, with a clean install of just Windows 7 and PC-DMIS, and ran a CMM with it for a few months. When everything was working good, we made an image of that PC and copied onto new PCs for all our other CMMs. There's no extra junk like an ERP, timeclock, email, or anything else that could cause an application conflict. We get maybe one crash per month at most, which is actually better than I've had with Calypso on some workstations.

That said, we have one manual CMM on our shop floor, which our old IT guy tried to lock down as much as possible. You can't even right click anywhere, save files anywhere, etc. It crashes every few minutes. I believe the majority of its problems are permissions.

PC-DMIS is a big program, with a massive amount of registry entries tied to it, and files stored in lots of places (including places Microsoft says you're not supposed to put things). Like many large applications for niche markets, there's not going to be same resources behind development and testing as there is with say Solidworks, CATIA or Photoshop. I think everyone needs to try CNC programming with Esprit before they're allowed to complain about PC-DMIS.

...and I have all my years of experience in Zeiss Calypso.

That's okay, we forgive you.