comprehensive? no
but i have run both. i started with esprite and have since moved to MasterCam X3.
largely what i have seen is that esprite is more flexible, but mastercam is faster.
esprite is geometry based so you any line you can manage to draw you can cut. anyway you like. i ran esprite in a shop that made one off industrial automation, so this was a really valuable thing for me. i spent more than a bit of time re-machining in features that the engineers changed or screwed up. everything took time though, and i mean everything. (though to cover my ass i should note that i was not using the latest version of esprite)
master cam is more feature based. i find it more annoying to build stuff from scratch or to modify features on imported models. though by modify features i mostly mean slap random lines through them and cut bits off. mastercam seems to be more subject to upstream errors, so if you get crappy solid models your going to be unhappy. that said, if your model's good or once you get your geometry built, toolpathing it is way easier. cutting a really dense feature set is easier to controll and organize. the verification bits are much easier to understand.
i did find esprite post files a bit easier to read. the language just seemed a bit closer to conversational. though, it's clearly not, and mucking around in a post file is done at ones own risk.
long story short i didn't find one to be vastly superior to the other. if you make goofball prototypes that need lots of tweaking in, i would suggest esprite. if you want to get a model and make a part in minimum time i'd think mastercam.
i've never used either for long run stuff so i can't say which would be better. esprite has better tooling and run reports, but mastercam seems to have more process management functionality. flip a coin.....  |