Slashdot Mirror
Staples Starts Selling 3-D Printer
An anonymous reader writes "Soon anyone will be able to head out to the store and buy a 3D printer: 'Staples, one of the leading office supply retailers in the U.S. announced it would begin selling 3-D Systems' entry level personal 3-D printer, The Cube. This is quite simply the single largest 3-D printer retail move to date by any 3-D printer manufacturer.' 'The Cube is one of a number of 3-D printers designed with traditional consumers in mind. Specifically, this unit can print items up to 5.5 inches tall, wide and long in one of 16 different colors. The retail bundle includes 25 free design templates to get users started but the real fun is designing and building something all your own.'"
of course it would be a proprietary cartridge based piece of shit.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
The Cube printer takes "filament cartridges" that puts the price of your extruded plastic through the roof.
not in all.
still, it's not that easy to find brick&mortar normal stores which sell 'em.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
3D printing is officially over as a hot /. topic?
So it will cost 3 times what you could get it for normally?
Seriously... Everything they sell is overpriced by at least 2x.
They're for office workers. (where people who come get stuff don't care how much their employer spends)
And for those emergency 'I GOTTA HAVE IT RIGHT NOW' type things.
"And no i don't wanna join your rewards club dammit. I just want this replacement mouse. No i really don't want to join. NO! i don't want to join. Just ring this up. It's $15. Here take my money. No i don't wanna join the rewards club and i'm REALLY sure."
Is there anything a typical na\"ive user can use?
Thus far I've been most successful w/ OpenSCAD --- I don't think that will work for most of Staples' clientele. I've tried pretty much everything here:
http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/CAD
But haven't found anything which really appeals --- is there anything I missed?
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
There is a bypass/hack for that http://www.howmuchsnow.com/cube/
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
"but the real fun is designing and building something all your own."
Need I point out how ironic that statement is, considering it's talking about the Cube.
I understand that not everyone wants to build their own printer, but you know how people used to complain about how you couldn't replace components on Macs? Imagine that, only more so, combined with the horror that is the ink-based markets of printers (the Cube only supports a cartridge system, made exclusively by 3-D Systems which is predictably overpriced).
It's too bad that these things are going to appear in consumer space before an infrastructure to handle 3D printer waste recycling was built out, but I guess it was inevitable. The proliferation of plastic garbage that will result from the adoption of 3D printing at the consumer level is going to make the current floating plastic garbage dumps in our oceans look like a minor annoyance in comparison.
A friend of mine got a squaretrade warranty for his android phone. It cost him $85 and the phone eventually broke. He sent it in to squaretrade paying his own shipping and they charged him a $100 deductible to fix it, and then sent it back. I looked up the price of a used phone same make/model from a local classified ad listing and they were going for $200. The $85 investment made him $10.
Hyper presser to sell or they get there hours cut
So it will cost 3 times what you could get it for normally?
Seriously... Everything they sell is overpriced by at least 2x. They're for office workers. (where people who come get stuff don't care how much their employer spends) "
So seriously, I can use one of these things at work now, in place of more traditional benefits?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The Cube 3D. An outrageous price-tag, locked-down functionality, overpriced model store, proprietary cartridges All that’s missing is an Apple logo.
Credit: FutureCyberdyneEngineer
Replacement cartridges, however, will be priced starting at $3000 a piece.
The OEM sample cartridge should be good for about 3 printed items.
One nail, 10 cents. A bunch of ABS plastic, $10. A 3d printer, $75. The look on gun-control advocates faces, Priceless!! http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/05/03/this-is-the-worlds-first-entirely-3d-printed-gun-photos/
Cool the first thing I am going to do with mine is make a ashtray for my dad
Not quite large enough to print lower receivers...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3693271&cid=43571789 Price point's only off by a cool grand and I thought Best Buy would be the first, but you can't win 'em all I guess.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
still, it's not that easy to find brick&mortar normal stores which sell 'em.
Cube 3D Printers & Supplies
"That's pretty cool, Sheldon. What are you printing?"
"I'm printing some Warhammer figurines. Not the 40K ones, either. Only the real ones."
"That...that doesn't look like a figurine."
(looks) "What? Very nice. A cock. Ha ha, very funny."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
They're too expensive and too exotic. They'll sit on the shelf and then be sold on the clearance table.
I want to be able to 3-D print electronic devices. Spare parts, or even entire phones and computers.
Specifically, this unit can print items up to 5.5 inches tall, wide and long in one of 16 different colors
seems women wouldn't be too interested in this quite yet
I don't understand why the objects need to be limited to 5.5 inches in 3 dimensions. A better design would be to have a moving base plate that allows the length to be much larger and limit the motion of the print head to two dimensions, more like a standard inkjet where the paper moves under the print head. The need to fit your object into such a small cube is a serious limitation - even letting one dimension become substantially larger would be a huge improvement in versatility and hence, likelihood of purchase.