Hi collincv,
From everything I've read so far, mach4 is about 8 times as much for the industrial version and there's not much difference between the mach3 and mach4.
Both Mach3 and Mach4 are Gcode interpreters and as such if you present a Gcode job to a Mach3 machine and
it cuts a part in a certain way then I would expect Mach4 to do exactly the same.
What is not apparent from its outward behavior is that Mach4 is or can be very much more flexible. It may
well be that you don't require powerful programming ability to have your machine operate properly
and in that circumstance Mach3 is entirely adequate.
There is a new feature of Mach4 that Mach3 does not have, its called Surface Map. The essential idea is that
you probe the surface of the bed of the mill an Mach records that data and thereafter corrects all moves to
accommodate the surface not being flat. There again it may not be strictly necessary for your machine but it does
serve to point out that Mach4 is progressing with new ideas and features whereas Mach3 is not.
That does not even touch on the Mach4 probing module or the Zero Brane editor/debugger......
It is true that Mach4Industrial is $1400 but Mach4Hobby that you and I use is only $200, with Mach3 still $175.
Mach4Industrial has only one feature that Mach4Hobby does not have, Macro B programming. If you don't
know what it is its because Mach3 never had it either. The real reason that Mach4Industrial is so much more
expensive is support. You can ring NFS anytime with a problem and you go to the top of the queue.
It is fairer to compare apples with apples and Mach3 should be compared to Mach4Hobby. The difference
in price is modest,$25 or 12.5%. Mach3 can be installed on any number of machines, Mach4 on up to five
machines.
Personally the modest differences in price and licensing are subsumed by Mcah4 being light years ahead of
Mach3 in terms of programming flexibility and new and upcoming features.
Craig