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Gartner Says 3D Printers Will Cost Less Than $2,000 By 2016
colinneagle writes "Widespread adoption of 3D printing technology may not be that far away, according to a Gartner report predicting that enterprise-class 3D printers will be available for less than $2,000 by 2016. 3D printers are already in use among many businesses, from manufacturing to pharmaceuticals to consumers goods, and have generated a diverse set of use cases. As a result, the capabilities of the technology have evolved to meet customer needs, and will continue to develop to target those in additional markets, Gartner says."
People would actually pay for reports which is just some wild-ass prediction? Wow, I know what field I should move into. My wild-ass predictions are buy one, get one free, a much better offer.
It's interesting how much of the technology for Skynet is being built by humans as tools.
It's very reminiscent of this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Cairns-Smith
In simplified form, this is the clay hypothesis: Clays form naturally from silicates in solution. Clay crystals, as other crystals, preserve their external formal arrangement as they grow, snap, and grow further. Clay crystal masses of a particular external form may happen to affect their environment in ways that affect their chances of further replication. For example, a 'stickier' clay crystal is more likely to silt a stream bed, creating an environment conducive to further sedimentation. It is conceivable that such effects could extend to the creation of flat areas likely to be exposed to air, dry, and turn to wind-borne dust, which could fall randomly in other streams. Thus - by simple, inorganic, physical processes - a selection environment might exist for the reproduction of clay crystals of the 'stickier' shape.
There follows a process of natural selection for clay crystals that trap certain forms of molecules to their surfaces (those that enhance their replication potential). Quite complex proto-organic molecules can be catalysed by the surface properties of silicates. The final step occurs when these complex molecules perform a 'Genetic Takeover' from their clay 'vehicle', becoming an independent locus of replication - an evolutionary moment that might be understood as the first exaptation.
Despite its frequent citation as a useful model of the kind of process that might have been involved in the prehistory of DNA, the 'clay hypothesis' of abiogenesis is not so popular, as with several other abiogenesis hypotheses. As it was current and fashionable at that time, Richard Dawkins used it as the example model of abiogenesis in his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker.
Dawkins poetically talks of a future "robot Cairns-Smith" working out that life has gone from being silicon based to carbon based and back again and each transition has vastly increased the speed at which it can develop. I.e. from the pseudo heredity of clay based 'life' to DNA protein based life and Darwinian evolution and finally to machines which understand themselves enough to far outpace pure Darwinian evolution by designing their successors.
Actually if we do get herded into camps by murderous AI this sort of idea would be a great deal of comfort to me.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
If it only gets me something with clunky 0.2mm resolution or worse... meh.
I want something that is precise enough to print detailed D&D miniatures and creatures, which means that the smallest details need to be in the neighborhood of about 20microns or so.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
How about the ink? Probably the same game as with current printer ink cartridges - ongoing profit maker...ripoff
Questionable if it's fair right now and in future???
I can't imagine needing a lot of poor quality plastic bits for anything. If I need any now, it's much cheaper and easier to buy them from China.
I don't respond to AC's.
Oh thank goodness! We'll now be able to print plastic dogshit cheaper than the cost of mass-producing it in China!
Then nobody will be able to take that away from us - short of prying it out of our cold dead hands.
Lets be honest, we barely use our home printers.
Who is "we"? I don't have a printer at all so I use it less than you do. But I know some people who print all kinds of things. Like most other activities that are optional, there are huge variations in what people do.
So "let's be honest". You're not going to use a 3-D printer much. I probably won't either. But there probably will be a significant minority that prints out all kinds of things.
And 640k should be enough for anyone.
People like you predicted no on would have a use for a computer in the home.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
McKinsey, same product, often the same methodology.
And it is *astonishing* how many of those reports you cannot find on the Internet later, when you want to make fun of them.
I suspect you're trolling but just in case you're not. The important thing about 3D printers is not how they're currently being applied but how they could be applied. I personally have zero interest in 3D printing in it's current state. I also probably wouldn't have been interested in computers in the 80s. The thing to understand is the technology will progress to the point where you can print just about anything in a 3D printer (a car, an assault rifle, medicine or even entire buildings). At that point everything can 1. Be built for the cost of the materiel its made and 2. Can be designed in an open source fashion. This will fundamentally change the way we look at things similarly to how the internet changed the way we think about ideas.
Waiting for it to be a service at e.g. my local Walgreen's (as lab-quality photo printing is today). Doesn't need to be in my house, just convenient.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
I think the same will happen with 3D printers. They will reach a price point where it is affordable. People will go out and buy one, they realize how much it actually costs to operate. From what I have seen is $5 per cubic inch.
Then of course is the software. Desktop publishing realy took off when one no longer needed a $2000 mac and $500 dedicated software. Right now a $1000 computer is good enough to do design work, but the software still costs. And people are simply not used to paying $500 like we were 15 or 20 years ago. Now personal software is $100 or less, for the most part.
But I think in a couple years this might be solved, and 3D printers will be mainstream for a while. At least many offices will have them, as well as schools. But for home use they will be no more popular than color laser printers.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
There are a ton of 3D printers on the market right now for less thank $2k, many for less than $1k. They are fully assembled machines too, not just a DIY hobby toys. I don't really understand how this article is news.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
the little models and small items I've seen people print could have been bought for a few dollars
http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Space-Marine-Terminator-Warhammer/dp/B000VT45O2
Just picked an example at random. Just a few dollars?
PS, Just so you know guys, I am TOTALLY 3D printing a giant plastic buttplug for myself right now, using data from my HOSTS file! I'm tellin ya, that thing has SO many undocumented uses!
APK
It may not be exactly what Gartner envisioned, but there's the RepRap project which aims to be able to fully self replicate. At least check it could print 50% of it's own parts, and they are working on being able to print electric circuitry next - http://www.reprapcentral.com/vmchk.html
1. It's Warhammer. That was not random.
2. Injection molding has an extra orders of magnitude finer detail than even the best 3D printers.
3. It's Warhammer.
What is next, you point to an iPhone when someone says you can buy a cheap flip phone for 20 bucks?
When 3d printers can custom make kitsch of all sorts in minutes at a local store, it is a revolution. Then its not just junk its YOUR personal junk :)
Or sub $20k, for that matter, but I don't think I'll see it by 2016.
I'm waiting for 3d printers that can print metal.
what about an automatic sandwich-maker?
This would actually be really nice. I could see a market for this. Hey, it looks like there's a bunch of companies online that do this, and can use all sorts of materials. Neat!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Wait five to ten years, and most of the things Family Dollar currently sells for under ten bucks, will only be available as 3D Patterns, for ten bucks, with unlimited printings.
If management of Sears Holdings Corporation were smart, they would:
* Make K-Mart an offline brand. No online/non-traditional retailing allowed;
* Rebrand all Sears Full Line stores to Big K-Mart;
* Use the Sears name only for Catalog, Internet, TV Shopping, and Telemarketing;
* Land's End would be a pattern company. Clothes, Home Decorating, and other patterns;
* KMart Stores would downsize in area, and only offer 2D and 3D patterns. The only physical objects would be the media that the pattern is in/on;
* KMart SuperCenter and Sears Grande would be merged into one chain, competing as a HyperMart, and include preprinted objects of the 3D and 2D patterns sold at K-Mart;
Wind Beneath Thy Wings
If Gartner predicts it will be a success, it won't. They never ever been right on anything. You would think that even a broken clock is right twice a day but Gartners clock isn't.
And for all the 3D printing fans, right now there is a cheap home production system out there. It is called the sewing machine. It used to be common in every house because producing your own clothes was cheaper and you could make what you needed, when you needed it. Brilliant! There was an entire eco-system around it with fabric stores and even stores that sold nothing but buttons.
Do you own a sewing machine? No? Why not? Because it takes to much skill? Because it is cheaper to buy crappy fall apart stuff made in sweatshops around the world and marked up 1000%?
Well then what makes you think 3D printing will take off as a home production system? Yes yes, you can print your own gun... GUN. SINGLE. So you going to buy a 2000 dollar printer to print a 100 dollar gun... And if you really want to make your own gun, there are already plenty of metal working tools out there that can do it for you. You can already buy all the tools to build a gun. Even in countries with strict gun laws.
3D printing is an amazing invention and will completely change how things are prototyped or how unique items are created. BUT it is the sewing machine, hand sewing machines are STILL used by those prototyping clothing AND artists that want to make something unique. The rest of us buy our crap of the rack.
Same as I don't have a vegetable patch, don't grow my own herbs in a window box, don't make my own soap, don't gather my own firewood, don't cut my own bread, don't generate my own electricity, don't make own compost for plants, fix my own car, paint my apartment.
Hell, how many here even build their own PC anymore? And if you go "oh but that is way to complex and time consuming"
EX-FUCKING-ACTLY
I actually have used 3d printing services to create some cases for Arduino projects. I used a hobby club where a member helped me (well, did all the work for me really) and created some cases from scratch. Very nice, very useful but really, no different from me going to a tailor and asking for a suit to be made (which is not as expensive as people think it is). I don't have a sewing machine and I don't see a future of me owning a 3D printing machine. Why would I? I can pay someone to do it or me, and they can then afford a much better one then I can afford and we are all happy and laughing at Gartners made up statistics.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Those cost about half your income and the price of a diamond ring.
damaged by dogma
So your point is..because paper documents have gone out of fashion...all physical objects are also useless? Or do you think paper printers aren't cheap and ubiquitous ? I built a 3D printer, and I don't print toys/models.
I broke a wheel on my dishwasher? I just drew one up and printed it, good as new. I broke a handle on my fileting knife..I printed one nicer than the original which has a fish gut scooper on the handle. I've printed brackets for my truck, pieces for the printer itself, and if I got really enterprising, I could use the printed plastic to make a lost-plastic casting and cast myself metal versions of anything I wanted. (See here: http://3dtopo.com/lostPLA/ )
My printer was under a thousand start to finish but that was self built so a lot more work than something you just unbox. (Mendelmax 2.0 from makerstoolworks.com if anyone cares(no affil))
Anyways, does it make pure financial sense? Maybe, maybe not. Does the ability to make any physical object that fits within my printers dimensions within a few minutes or hours make it worth it for me? Definitely. Some things take weeks when you need them now, sometimes you need to try 10 versions of something before it would make sense to pay for a final high quality one to be made. Sometimes its an object not important enough to spend the time and money on if you need to send away for it, but it would be neat to have. There are a million reasons I think 3D printers can work for the average Joe and see regular use.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Lets be honest, we barely use our home printers. I'm glad I have it, but I bought my color laser in 2009 and have never changed the toners.
Sure, but I think for many people, printers fall into the "not often needed but occasionally really nice" category.
This would explain why the printer market has developed the way it has, with super incredibly cheap printers that quickly get expensive if you use them a lot.
For some people, a better method of achieving this is easily availabled shared printers (e.g. there are still plenty of internet/manga cafes around here with printers, and the convenience stores all have copiers that can do printing or scanning from/to USB devices and SD cards), but especially in the sparsely populated U.S., I guess mega cheap personal printers that fall over after 10 pages are more popular...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Lets be honest, we barely use our home printers. I'm glad I have it, but I bought my color laser in 2009 and have never changed the toners. I print everything to PDF. I have no desire to own a 3D printer because I see no use for it, the little models and small items I've seen people print could have been bought for a few dollars rather than buying a $2,000+ printer and the plastic it uses. If I really need a 3D model I imagine paying someone a few bucks on ebay or craiglist to print custom items. Sorry 3D printer makers, but these will always be for a very niche market, never mainstream.
Turn in your nerd card! You can only print stuff ordered that others designed. If you design yourself, you need to prototype. This is no different from making software versus using software. Everybody who makes software needs a device to work on, instead of only consume, everybody who makes objects needs a printer to try it on, instead of a service that delivers prints at home.
What you claim is hence: "I don't make or design stuff, so I don't need a 3D printer." Yes, but there are many people out there that do make things, probably more than there are software coders. 3D design is also easier than programming, so schools will quicker pick this up than adding coding to the curriculum.
This is indeed not mainstream, but most houses have kids at a certain time, so a 3D printer will be handy, and if people are fed up waiting for a package or the 3D services are not that good, buying one will be an option. In the end, it will come down to ease of use of the printer. I'm able to service my 3D printer, 95% of the population would not manage with the printers in use today. My first order to shapeways took 2 weeks before they notified it could not be printed, and refunded me. Second order took 1.5 weeks to arrive.
I hope that 3D printers create a new class of tinker: I take my broken gearwheel to him. He does a 3D scan or downloads the specifications and then prints a new part. Repair mechanics don't need to carry inventory of spares. Plus, spare parts aren't declared 'obsolete' once the model is 2 years old.
But i think your saying that not everyone will have them. Only some will.
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
Yea but you get a free dishwasher, and clothes washer too.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The problem is, the run-time on these is so long, it's only justifiable for one-offs or prototypes.
Using a CNC machine to make molds for injection makes more sense now: http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/
But I'm still surprised not to see 3d printers:
- in automotive service departments to print trim pieces in the right colour
- paired w/ a 3d scanner in a hardware store --- customer brings in broken thing-a-ma-bob, it gets scanned, one is then directed to the right aisle for a replacement, or a quote to print a replacement is generated
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Holy shit, those coke-snorting peons at Gartner still have a pulse? (I remember trying to explain the importance of - and future prospects for - 3D accelerators... to some of their analysts back in '95 or '96... they didn't get it and damn were they sure I didn't!) ROFL...
Perhaps you should look at the quality and finish that most 3D plastic nozzle based printers achieve. It's awful. I also expect a lot of people would have a thing about eating off plastic plates especially ones where the uneven surface pattern ensures the accumulation of food particles and the cutlery and washing puts ugly scratches all over it in no time.
Sorry 3D printer makers, but these will always be for a very niche market, never mainstream.
I imagine much the same was said back when Wozniak was working on the Apple I and Apple II computers
Sure, while it's still a fernickerty process requiring some skill it'll be niche. When it's developed to be quicker, reliable and more accessible then I think we'll see them becoming more mainstream.
I am going to wait before I buy one of these 3D printers. Once they can print 256Gig SSD drives, they will be worth buying...
So throw away the entire appliance market, glassware market, automotive technology market, video games market etc media market, fine clothing market--Lands' End isn't just style, but actually well-made clothes unlike the garbage from Wal-Mart that falls apart first washing--and change their entire business model to "Plastic Shit for Rednecks"? Because K-Mart says "fat slob shop here" and Sears kind of says "stuck-up, haughty salesmen who think they're better than you trying to sell you rich-boy shit."
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Why not teach the 3D printer to extrude wax????
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Isn't that what "niche market" means?
Technoli
Waiting for it to be a service at e.g. my local Walgreen's (as lab-quality photo printing is today). Doesn't need to be in my house, just convenient.
That actually might be a double-plus for them. Get rid of the cheap plastic gimmicks that they sell and put some 3-D printers there. With quick-access buttons to print out the cheap plastic gimmicks.
No need for inventory or shipping them in from China!
There are several services that will print and ship what you upload.
The difference between consumer-class and enterprise-class 3D printers are minor. Controlled temperature environment is one of them.
As soon as one of the small fish is advertising features of the so called enterprise-class 3D printers, they are sued into oblivion by Stratasys and others using their patents.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
How about a hardware store printing parts? Parts for cars, hot water heaters, everything, can be printed locally. This will revolutionize things. Now, we're not there yet but 20 years ago nobody thought that soon a phone would fit in your pocket and would also be a TV, a computer, a portable "cassette" player, a photo album, a game boy ...
3D printing is going to change manufacturing and distribution of parts.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
No. For example, if 90% of all man-made things you touch are now made via 3-D printers, it'd be way too large to be considered niche. But it could still be low usage among people in general. Alternately, its use could be widespread, like regular printers. Do we say that laser printers serve only a "niche market"?
The 'ink' isn't going to be a problem. Someone already thought of that as one of the things that might hold back 3D printing. There is a great article on it: http://techland.time.com/2013/03/04/how-an-83-year-old-inventor-beat-the-high-cost-of-3d-printing/
From the article:
"In May of 2012, the contest, dubbed the Desktop Factory Competition, debuted on iStart.org, a Kauffman-owned platform for entrepreneurial competitions. Sponsored by Inventables, Kauffman and the Maker Education Initiative, it offered $40,000 from Kauffman and hardware prizes such as a 3D printer from Inventables to the first person or team who submitted plans for an open-source device capable of turning plastic pellets into filament. The rules also mandated that the parts involved could cost no more than $250, priced at a 400-unit quantity."
"Buy a kilogram of pellets and make your own filament, and the cost goes down to $10. Buy 25 kilograms of pellets in bulk, and you can print the chess pieces for just $5."
Just recycle. They'll be brand new every time.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Re: the comment about "$5 per cubic inch". I just calculated the material cost of a calibration object of volume 4cm^3, with a fairly moderate infill. On my printer it consumed 3g of plastic, which costs $40/kg. This object cost $0.12 in plastic, or about $0.03/cm^3. Continuing.... 1 cubic inch is 16.4 cm^3, or an equivalent cost of about $0.49. Five dollars is a bit high for a personal machine cost, even including the electricity.
Printing services will double or triple the material cost to account for waste & setup and include machine time in the price. With triple material charges, the above object would be $1.50, and it would take about 10 minutes at $0.15/min ($1.50). This is a total cost of $3.00 for an object of this size, in plastic.
When it becomes an appliance it will be mainstream. Prior to that it will continue to be something for enthusiasts, artists, home professionals and made to order providers.
To be an appliance it will need to have a catalog of stock products. The expensive versions will have customization options and use more expensive or better quality materials and higher quality output. Very likely it will not allow original creations though there will be hacks to enable it (rootkits) - think mobile devices and media players. There will still be a market for enthusiast machines of course but they will be more expensive (still less than today's prices).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
reprap is already $500
they already have injection molding machines that do that; they've had that for decades (since the 90s at least)
i remember going to brookfield zoo, and having a gorilla made to order in '90 and then again in '03
i could probably go and get another one once the zoo opens
Yea but you get a free dishwasher, and clothes washer too.
Still using the old dishwasher, clothes washer, and sandwich-maker as before with only the cost of most of my income and diamond ring. . . .
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Nerd that works in the fashion industry here, funny story on that one, but any rate we just bought a mid-range 3d printer. Reason, so the fashion designer could create 3D models of button designs and with a little paint get an idea of how it would look on a design sample. From there you can make a casting for a mold to send to a metal or glass maker to make the real thing. Right now we're making a little extra because other area designers are coming in to use it to prototype things like jewelry, belt buckle designs, etc.. I'm sure in a couple years they might have their own, but these are generally creative people. But they all seem to use Autocad.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Thanks for proving me right.
Thin clients are everywhere. EVERY-Friggen-WHERE!!!
Hint: Check your Smartphone or Tablet. Check out Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox. Thin clients morphed while you were asleep.
And Google Glass is already being heavily developed even when its not out of beta yet.
Time to wake up from your long winter's nap AC, and stop telling other people to shut up until you get a clue. Final products don't always look like the speculative products. 3D printers won't always be making toys. They will probably be making our clothing, and there may well be one in every closet/laundry room which could pop out a new shirt on demand (custom tailored), and recycle the old ones.
Don't be such a box-thinker.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
they already have injection molding machines that do that; they've had that for decades (since the 90s at least)
i remember going to brookfield zoo, and having a gorilla made to order in '90 and then again in '03
i could probably go and get another one once the zoo opens
They've had them at rest stops on the Florida Turnpike since it was built (1960's, I think). I believe they had them at the local zoo, at least for a while.
But there's an essential difference. The injection molding machines each have the ability to manufacture ONE thing, which is whatever the dies installed on it shaped. And due to their construction, they made objects that were mostly hollow.
An actual 3D printer can make anything that you can provide viable blueprints for, hollow or not, subject to the limitations of color, material and topology.
Plus, the idea here was that the same machine could print both commercial product and walk-in projects.
Lost PLA works just as well, but yes printers can extrude wax. There have been DIY versions, and there are commercial ones as well. Shapeways uses commercial wax printers to do lost wax casts of prints commercially. Just upload your file to em and they will give you a silver version of your file !
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Oh gosh you got me, one of the most likely type of "little model" to be printed is irrelevant to the discussion.
Recycling PLA is harder, though. The polymer chains are permanently shortened, and you need to either heat or chemically dissolve the material and then re-extrude it. Wax works great in a hopper pot and is infinitely reusable and cheap.
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And 640k should be enough for anyone.
People like you predicted no on would have a use for a computer in the home.
By that logic every new gadget will be in billions of homes and offices. Who marked this as insightful? It's trolling.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I suspect you're trolling but just in case you're not. The important thing about 3D printers is not how they're currently being applied but how they could be applied. I personally have zero interest in 3D printing in it's current state. I also probably wouldn't have been interested in computers in the 80s. The thing to understand is the technology will progress to the point where you can print just about anything in a 3D printer (a car, an assault rifle, medicine or even entire buildings). At that point everything can 1. Be built for the cost of the materiel its made and 2. Can be designed in an open source fashion. This will fundamentally change the way we look at things similarly to how the internet changed the way we think about ideas.
I suspect you're trolling, to assume consumer or even pro-sumer 3D printers will eventually be printing cars or (LOL!) building. By that logic we should all be printing magazines and giant posters from our walmart inkjet printers. Sure, technically you can, but you'll get a better quality poster for $5 from walmart than what you could print at home with a average inkjet and photo inks and taping a dozen pages together.
Will there be 3D printers that print buildings? Of course, just like there's printers that print professional magazines and beautiful posters, but you don't find those for sale at your average office supply store, and they're not affordable for the average SOHO, it's cheaper to pay someone else to print those things for you which is what I said in parent: "If I really need a 3D model I imagine paying someone a few bucks on ebay or craiglist to print custom items."
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
omg you found the one exception, i guess that makes my entire argument invalid, because you found a plastic figurine that is being sold by one store for $20
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Lost wax, like PLA, is generally just burned away out of the mold. You just blow the ashes out. Recycling in this case isn't the main concern.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
True, but wax is also a lot cheaper.
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