YAY! Kickstarter at work. This is the laser+resin technique for doing 3D prints and they are coming to the home. Sure $3000 is a lot for a hobbyist but it won't be long before they're much cheaper. (Although is it a lot - Pete's TT bike cost more than that!)
It's the future, baby!
Comments
This is an interesting design a bit more compact than the others in this new wave of resin based 3d printers
Price wise 3k seems to be about the current going rate (the resin based machine i have on order is similar in price point also a kick starter should be here any day now very excited :D) they are actually mechanically less complicated than a FDM based printer and the dlp projector or laser assembly is often the limiting factor that and the need for the whole thing to be UV light tight to prevent the resin hardening so the chasis tends to be more beefy but the rest is a single screw build plafrom and some sort of shutter mechanism
The resolution on this is a little lower than others I've seen 25 microns (0.001 in) layers with features or XY resolution of as small as 300 microns (0.012 in)
the b9 creator as low as 10 micron layers with an xy selectable between 100microns and 50microns with reduction in build area.
Still it's nice to see more resin based machines popping up
I think their comparisons with FDM machines are a little out of date now the examples of crappy prints look nothing like some of the new ones that have just come out. The new version of the makerbot replicator (replicator 2 which is 2k fully assembled) is looking very sweet with 100 micron layers and a really professional looking construction a far cry from the cheap laser cut wooden box of the cupcake. The innovation in both FDM and Resin based machines is heating up with the ease of use and quality of prints getting better and better
I've been looking at stuff like this, and laser cutters, as as-and-when we move house, I'd quite like to have a man-shed/workshop, and it would seem much more upto date having whirring box magically producing stuff, than having a random selection of power tools.
What strikes me most about the 3D Printers is that the material costs seem very high. The resin printer is quoting $150/litre for resin, and the Makerbot is $50/kilo. A good quality casting resin is $30/kilo (roughly a litre). They do seem to be taking the printer model literally, charging a fortune for consumables.
A laser cutter cannot do the same type of production (pretty much limited to 2D structures, with limited enraving/debossing), however the materials are much cheaper and more varied, more easily available, and (for an artistic luddite like me) the production designs are far simpler to make (it does seem for 3D printers that 99% of stuff is reproducing others designs...)
The reason printers took off was that anyone could use them, and the tools were freely available...their decline is due to the daft cost of consumables...do 3D-printers run the same risk, but without the ease of creation for the general public?
It's interesting point but I think we are still to early in the development of these home use 3d printers to compare them to 2d printers much. There is already a parallel in that the cost of conusables for professional 3d printers is much much higher than the home use ones for example a stratasys mojo (which on it's own is 9000 dollars) uses cartridges that cost $399 for 80 cubic inches of ABS which is $133 per lb where as reprap sourced abs filament is more like $7 to $14 dollars per lb so it's 10 to 20 times cheaper and with a good machine the quality of prints can be comparable.
Resin machines are too new at this stage for the prices to settle I saw 10cents per gram as one quote 150 buck per liter but there are few places that sell the stuff so no competition if the resin method becomes more popular I suspect the price will drop as people take advantage of greater economies of scale.
Sure materials for laser cuttung are cheaper they have far more uses a sheet of acrylic can be used in all sorts of applications so loads of people sell it, a reel of abs filament or a jug of photo polymer resin is only going to have one application and needs special manufacturing. As with 3d printers laser cutters have their limitations you can't cut ABS (unless you like breathing cyanide) or PVC (Chlorine gas) and other materials that don't cut but in a non killing you sort of way.
Design wise I suppose it is easier depends a lot on what you are building I think and the tools you are using. For 3d stuff on printers there are a lot of existing stuff to print on places like thingiverse (also a lot of stuff for laser cutters as well). making your own designs can be tricky but some of the newer tools are fairly easy to use.
As to if the home printing is pricing themselves out of the market it seems unlikely at this stage a reel of ABS maybe 50 bucks but that goes a long way 1 kilo if you used 100% infil would make 960 cubic cm of stuff and typically most objects are fine at 20-30% infill and unlike a 2d printer the stuff you make with it is recyclable there are projects to build companion machines that will take old or broken prints and grind them up melt them down and turn them back into filament. This won't work for resin as it's a curing process rather than a thermoset but I thing it's unlikely resin printers will become as popular as their FDM based counterparts there is a lot of faffing about with them.
I think it's inaccurate to say the reason printers did well was their ease of use a lot of them are decidedly not easy to use mechanically unstable (paper feeding mechanisms that eat paper if they are slightly misaligned) sometimes requiring controlled environments (early home lasers would refuse to print if the environment was too cold or the humidity out of range) they did well because of a fundamental need for hard copy and a lack of other ways to move data around or show it to others. You can get away without that these days increasingly we have no need for hardcopy and printers have gone more and more out of fashion. People can use the internet to exchange info in a completely digital manner we can have our data with us on usb sticks or active on tablets smartphones etc. We have less need to print anything out.
But physical objects are still useful and the improved exchange of information only makes the use of 3d printers easier. If you can;tr design something someone else could and probably already has if it's something popular. It lowers the bar of entry significantly.
I think we are a way yet from the sort of maturity we see in 2d printers in 3d printers the sort of click send to printer unattended print no messing about. It's getting there with some of the most recent generation but it'still a work in progress.
I would disagree about the complexity of designing in 3D...in the grand scheme of things I'm fairly computer savvy, however 3D design is virtually impossible for me. I've gone through all the UT3 design videos, and mucked around with various 3D Design tools (from Googles Sketchup, though Blender and Maya), and while I understand the concepts, I really struggle to be able to construct in 3D... I know I'm not alone in this. Building up a primarily 2D item, however, or plans for a 3D construction with flat sides, is far easier...and something that most people are taught at some level throughout their education (surface area of a house anyone?)
Regading the popularity of normal printers...I agree there was a need for hardcopy, however the simplicity of production meant that every revision was printed x number of times. Even now, I "officially" work in a paperles office, but most times the work is printed out for read/review (even now, I'm working on a printout, as I find reviewing easier if I can red-pen it). I would imagine that a 3D object would also need several revisions before final production, so the same issues would apply. Printers came into their own in the office, and I would expect that 3D printers will probably be the same (and then technical issues are less of a concern, as there will be someone in charge of fixing it...unlike home kit).
I fully agree laser cutters are far more limited in useage...they are limited by material, structure complexity and material thickness.
It does seem that 3D Printers are keen to copy existing printer models...even you mention cartridges etc, and you'd have to assume that the "big" companies are involved in this stuff, or will be buying into it at some point, and will translate their existing models over...
Finally...is FDM the type of printer that builds up (similar to the ones of yours I've sen where plastic is melted and piped into the shape?)? Whereas I'm guessing the resin-type ones more carve the object out of a block?
I think people will print fantastically complex things by combining stuff made in 3D by others. Look at the blender marketplace - you can download a few models and pose great scenes. As 3D printing continues to take off you won't need to be a 3d designer to do stuff, you'll just need the idea and let the internet set the price for its creation. That's no different to now - you could have done the Starsmash poker chips yourself but you asked me. You could have paid someone even more Pro than me. There is no analogue with printed-to-be-read media and 3D printers.
I think that the current printer/toner model is flawed and that the technology is dying out. When ePaper becomes more prevalent, cheaper and larger (it will) then you won't have paper because it will cost more in the long run. You will just use your epaper with touch screen for note taking.
In any mass produced device where there is competition, the margin on the device is always skimped on and it becomes content that makes the money. Computers, phones, tablets, ereaders and anything that consumes "content", be it apps, games or books, have barely any margin. The content providers (iTunes, Google Play, Amazon) are making the margin. You won't need to make the margin on resin like you would toner because you can make your margin selling content for the printer. Consumerables are easy to replicate and mass produce, you're never going to corner that market. Content can be unique, though. Content can set you apart.
The issue with buying content for production is that it just doesn't stack up. It's a bit like photo-printers (which never caught on really...as they were a waste of time and money. If you really wanted hard-copy, you are better off spending ~8p a photo at Boots, and saving the expense of printer and consumables).
For example...I want a cup! I could;
1) Buy a 3D printer
2) Buy a design for a cup
3) Buy the materials for a cup
4) Make a cup
or I could;
1) Buy a cup
Either way...it's not my cup, I feel no real ownership for it. It's a cup that someone else has designed...and I've spent an in-ordinate amount of time and money to get to my newly cup-fulfilled status. For pre-designed items (and to a large extent self-designed small runs) central manufacture will always beat it financially. Companies like Shapeways are your best bet. They can buy en masse to reduce costs, and run small manufacture jobs at a mark-up...designers can use their marketplace, and not have to worry about compatibility of their design against some home-run manufacture system.
The real selling point (I feel) for 3D printers is the ability to self-design and manufacture... I'm pretty certain everyone on here is to some extent a creator (be it code, models, art etc etc)...there is a buzz you can't beat when you have something tangible, and know that you made it.
You bake a cake...you're proud of it! It's awesome, and defines chocolateyness!
You microwave a meal...somewhat less proud? It's bland, with the aftertaste of plastic.
Regarding the poker chips, I ask you to do it as I want them to look good (and they do, awesome feedback on them!)... I could have done them, but they would have been far less impressive. If they had been just for myself, I absolutely would have done them myself. In this case I have "microwaved" them (it was an exceptionally good microwave), but in less important circumstances I would have "baked" them myself (and in all probability burnt them in the process).
FDM is the plastic melted then piped out of a nozzle in layers method easiest analogue is icing being piped onto a cake to make shapes
Resin printers use lasers or a projector to harden light sensitive resin in layers by beaming the pattern layer by layer onto the surface of a tank of the stuff.
Maybe my view on designing in 3d is skewed because I can do it and so assume most people can I suppose it requires a lot of understanding of how things work in 3 dimensions. Some of the design tools for solid object modelling (which is an off shoot of 3d modelling where you are designing solid objects rather than shells of polygons like in blender or maya or 3d studio) work almost exclusively in maths and are more like programming than drawing.
Places like shapeways are an interesting halfway house they buy the ludicrously expensive comercial 3d printers and then churn out the stuff for a cut but they also offer there own set of design tools that will take things like 2d sketches and make them 3d stuff. They also had a little app that allowed you to design a vase/bowl/cup using a simple profile editing interface and a 3d display showing how it would look. It's a way for people that can't design in conventional packages a way to have their own custom cup within the limitations of the app.
A lot of big companies are in the 3d printer market and have been for many many years. #d printers are not really new they've been around since the late 70's the patent for selective laser sintering (a powder based printing technique big tub of plastic powder high energy laser heats the powder to fuse or sinter it together drop it down a bit add a new layer repeat) was in 1979 and stereolithograpy (lasers drawing on light sensitive polymer/resin) was 1987 FDM was developed in the 1989. It's been available in commercial form for big organizations and places like universities for a while now in very very expensive form (cheapest I've seen was 9000 dollars and that's a tiny almost hobby machine the big ones cost 10's of thousands). The language of cartridges and the same charging stupid money for refills comes form that end of the world which give it's controlled nature could extract lots of money that way. What's new is these are the first home use machines there a lot cheaper.
They allow people to make things that would have been very difficult to produce conventionally and because of the relatively quick speed of print and low cost of materials they can iterate a design printing it off making adjustments printing it again till they have it right. And with services like Thingiverse you can get other peoples designs to print or modify them to suit you purpose or improve them with your own ideas.
With 3d printers being very much in the enthusiast territory the tools are still evolving something like blender or 3d studio or maya is not ideal suited to the task of making 3d models for 3d printers because they are designed for polygon modelling not solid objects and that can cause problems if you get things like non manifold shapes or odd normals (essentially an object that surface is not continuous is non manifold or with shared edges normals tell you which way a surface points) and there are not a lot of cheap easy to use solid object modeling packages yet solidworks is a comercial one that is pricey an then there is the open source scad but that is fairly hard to use. As these machines start to get into the hands of more people and the low end becomes more comercial I suspect tools will improve.
I actually remember watching Tomorrows World, and Maggie Philbin showing a 3D printer at work...from your descriptions it sounds like it was a resin/stereolithograpy printer...it was using a laser into a pool of blue liquid (and the thing that came out was a blue-plasticy thing)...that must have been the late 80's or early 90's.
There is a chap down in Portsmouth that does custom models...he does the design in a 3D tool, then uses a service like Shapeways to produce a master, before using more traditional casting techniques (i.e. silicone molds and centrifuge casting). I've got him doing some custom Space Marine Shoulder Pads for me at the mo
To 3D-print all 100 of them would cost an absolute fortune, while using the 3D-printer for master-making, the costs are more;
It's only once the 3D printer can match/beat the cost of production of more traditional methods that it will really catch on.