Tiny 3D Printer

This is cool.

Some nerds from Austria have made this really small… commercial scale/cost 3D printer, and there’s some sort of prehistoric tree in the background.

Maybe they’re not nerds… looking closer at the big (really big) picture, there is “something of the hipster” about them. Am I being distracted by irrelevant details? I wonder how many things it’s possible to be distracted by at once. About 4 or 5 I would have thought.

Still… projected cost about 1200 eu – and 1/20mm resolution… using LEDs to harden the substrate… rather than lasers or extrusions or whatever. 1/20mm? that’s pretty impressive. That’s vertical resolution – I wonder what sideways resolution is. I think this is probably the way desktop machines are going to go though – if the resolution is going to be a function of light-focus and substrate granularity, then heated extrusion might be a bit of a blind-alley I think. I still think there needs to be a cutting tool though. Or a cutting machine.

Maybe a reprap isn’t a single device. Maybe it’s a nine-axis cutting tool AND a 3D printer. Symbiotes that make parts for each other.

Ok. 1200 EU. I think… that might be how much normal printers cost. I know you’re going to kick up a fuss and say no no no, mine only cost $100… but what is happening with your $100 printer is that the utterly extortionate cost of 1/2 filled printer-cartridges is subsidising the hardware. The printer-makers have slid into this model and now they need to do it to compete. So… if the substrate for 3D printers follows the same (entirely toxic) route of 2D printers… then 1200 is probably already at price-parity. We’re probably already there…. they just ain’t in the shops yet.

And the real money (and developmental potential) probably isn’t in the hardware, it’s probably in the ink.