What happened is it didn’t live up to the hype.Consumer grade 3D printers are shit. They’re amazing, but they’re also shit.
Franklin Veaux gave this explanation in his own answer, and it’s pretty solid. Even with a lead-in like that, though, his conclusions are still a little too positive.
Although problems do get mentioned, his answer really focuses on the future of the tech, which is hard to put limits on. That makes it easy to say that things will just get better with time, when there’s actually no guarantee they will.
I like to call that outlook, “the path of relentless optimism” - and it’s still pretty common in the industry.
To counterbalance that, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty bits that get lost in translation - and talk about what they probably mean for where things are headed.
The first place that’s missing some detail is right in the opening sentence:
Nothing. It’s still a thing.
Yes, it’s true that 3D printers are still out there and selling well, but the game has changed a lot. Up until 2015, the consumer printing market had exponential growth that attracted lots of interest:
And then that crazy growth just… stopped. A lot of industry leaders, like Makerbot, expanded production to meet demand that never materialized, and they suffered pretty heavily for it:
Companies and investors getting burned like that killed a lot of external enthusiasm in the market. Specifically, the consumer printer market.
Less enthusiasm means less new investment, which means less innovation. That leaves consumer printers stuck in a bit of a rut, and it’s hard to say how long it’ll last.
If you compare 3D printers to paper and ink printers, the market doesn’t even have something as good as an antique Epson dot matrix printer on the market yet.
This is a pretty good comment because of how straightforward it is - the majority of the printers on the market right now don’t work very well, and people have a habit of downplaying that.
But that’s not true of all of them. Ultimaker’s printers are high-quality machines that remove a lot of the problems that Franklin is talking about:
They just cost… $2500 minimum.
And that’s the thing - more expensive printers produce significantly better results. Part of the reason that people were so excited about consumer 3D printers was an expectation that, like a lot of other tech, the high-priced features were going to trickle down to lower price points over time.
That hasn’t happened.
It’s hard to say exactly what’s preventing us from having cheap, quality printers, but it turns out that it wasn’t as simple as better industrial engineering and economies of scale.
It’s entirely possible that good printers will always be expensive. Most other manufacturing technology is.
It is going to take a significant revolution—say, the equivalent of the first laser printer or even the first inkjet—before home 3D printing ever begins to approach its potential.
This is the big sticking point, because there’s really no guarantee of the “potential” that everyone sees.
The problem is that people like to use 2D printing for comparison, which really just had one central problem that was holding back speed and quality - quick-drying ink.
Meanwhile, to 3D print something well, you need:
- Workable Material
- Fast Hardening
- Durable Results
- Quick Print Action
- Accurate Prints
These are all contradictory properties, which means you wind up sacrificing one of them to improve a different one. Printed materials trade between workability, durability, and hardening speed. Printers themselves trade between quick action and accuracy.
For example, SLA/DLP printing improves on normal FDM printers by curing liquid resin with a UV light, but that resin is slow to harden and not durable (UV-cured resins aren’t stable, and age badly).
Especially when you start looking at the materials, the amount of stuff we’re asking for means that we might never find a good answer.
All this future uncertainty means that the real silver bullet for 3D printing is managing expectations.
If you expect 3D printers to turn into Star Trek style Replicators and replace all modern manufacturing technology, you’re going to be waiting a very, very long time. Possibly forever.
But if you understand that printers give you an unparalleled level of design freedom, then suddenly you can start taking advantage of their strengths, and that long list of requirements for what improvements you need gets a lot shorter.
You can make print speed less important by printing things that are hollow:
You can improve durability by making latticed parts:
And you can ignore bad accuracy by printing things that don’t need it:
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