Slashdot Mirror
Consumers Not Impressed With 3D Printing
Lucas123 (935744) writes "Putting a 3D printer beside the coffee maker in every home, as some manufacturers hope will happen someday, is a long ways from reality as consumers today still don't understand how the technology will benefit them, according to a new study. The study, by Juniper Research, states that part of the problem is that killer applications with the appropriate eco-system of software, apps and materials have yet to be identified and communicated to potential users. And, even though HP has announced its intention to enter the 3D printing space (possibly this fall) a massive, mainstream corporation isn't likely to change the market."
Whining about lack of software as a roadblock to mass adoption of home 3D printing is absurd at this point in time.
Inexpensive 3D printing is still barely more than a toy for hobbyists. I have one (mendlemax 2), and while I love playing with it, I recognize it for what it is.
The path forward as I see it for home 3D printing is:
- spend a long damn time in the hobbyist domain
- eventually capabilities will hit a point where actual useful products can be produced, but it will still be way more effort to do so than to buy the equivilant mass-produced item.
- small niche markets will open up offering custom things and replacement parts that are no long available. I forsee a long period of time where 3D printing is practical, but at a small business level rather than a home level. The "bring your model down to staples" phase if you will.
- eventually some people will start using these services regularily and start dreaming of having one at home
- this is when 3D printing at home really takes off
This is however so far away that I may not be alive to see it. When the time comes, I'm sure someone will whip up a slick UI...
It's the same deal with photo printers. It's much easier and cheaper to go down to Walmart or Costco when you need to print out your photos and get them to use their professional quality machines to do the job. I think that 3D printers will end up in the same sport. You'll go down to Walmart, and get them to print out an item for you. You'll only need it maybe 5 times a year, so there's no point in owning your own 3D printer. There's already services where you can send a 3D file and somebody will print it out and ship it to you.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
if they could create a 2D printer that wasn't a crotchety piece of shit, then people would be more excited. I don't look forward to trying to unjam some 3D printer nozzles full of melted plastic.
“If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse.” – Henry Ford
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Load file.
Press print.
Yeah, real inspiration.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
My friend's company just got a multi-million dollar 19-axis robot for carving custom wood. They're the only ones in America with one that does specifically what they do. It has already paid for itself in 3 years. If they didn't work with wood and did prototypes or CNC or something more 3d printer friendly, dropping a few thousand on a top of the line 3D printer would be no problem. A shipment of materials costs more than that. The staff hours carving custom parts out of plastic alone would pay for it. So I'd say they need to target businesses first, use the funds to make the technology much better, THEN go cheap and target the residential customers with even lower priced machines.
3-D is ok for a one-off prototype. But who needs a $1000 device that takes hours to print a happy meal toy?
Raj and Howard in front of a 3d printer:
Raj: Ooh. I, I think it's done.
(Opens door to printer)
Raj: It worked! We printed a whistle.
Howard: Amazing. You realize these things go for 25 cents a pop at a party store.
Raj: And we made it in only three hours!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Right now we have a consumer culture that doesn't really teach people to make and repair their own things (which is what a 3D printing would mostly be useful for). So while a 3D printer might someday be useful for a mechanic who needs to make car parts or a shoe salesmen who needs to make a custom shoe, most people are still expecting to go to someone else to get those things. As the technology improves and can make more things (metal parts, rubber, glass, composites) and people get more used to it, we may see the market for the technology grow, assuming it isn't outlawed first.
In more than one way it will be the killer application, for not only will it be the application that makes everyone want one but also the application that will send a very, very powerful enemy onto 3D Printing: Printing car replacement parts.
Think of all those small and not so small little bits of plastic that you have to pay for through the nose when (or should I say, as soon as) they crack. On your car, your motorcycle, your various other appliances. But with car manufacturers this will not be very popular, as one can imagine. They make quite a bit of money with spare parts and the planned obsolescence of various parts that "just so happen" to wear and tear.
Now, with patents it's fairly easy to keep other manufacturer from ruining this very profitable market. It's way harder if every Joe Random can make their own parts, essentially for free.
If you thought the battle of content owners vs. file sharing was fierce, just think what the battle between car part manufacturers vs. part printers will be.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem with most low-end extruder-type printers is that the engineering sucks. Most 3D printers work by trying to push a string with a gear (which jams or fails to feed), trying to weld a hot thing to a cold thing (which produces weak welds), trying to perform a process that is very temperature-sensitive without air temperature control (which makes the process fail frequently), and trying to weld a plastic that has too high a coefficient of expansion (which causes cracks during cooling).
Some of them then follow up by building a 3-axis motion system out of thin wood (too flexible), and using screw threads and nuts (too much play and backlash) instead of Acme lead screws and recirculating-ball nuts (like real CNC tools.) The end result is miserable process repeatability. This is why a big fraction of hobbyist-level 3D print jobs fail.
HP can probably solve those problems. Many of them are similar to the problems inkjet printers and pen plotters face. HP made both of those technologies work well. It wasn't easy. As one engineer pointed out, intuition fails you when trying to understand what's going on with ink at microdroplet size. HP had to use supercomputers to simulate the fluid dynamics before they got a print head that worked really well. (Of course, most of the engineers who did that were laid off years ago.) Many of the problems with 3D printers are cheaply solveable if you're making hundreds of thousands of them, not hundreds.
I think if you want to sell them to people, you may need a useful consumer application first. I don't mean "application" like a software program. I mean a use-case.
Really, right now, 3D printing has been developed and marketed for hobbyists, even if the marketing people didn't know that's what they were doing. They've said, "Make your own designs and share them with others!" Admittedly, that's great stuff, but most people don't want to design their own products. They want their products to be designed by someone who knows what they're doing.
So if... Let's say Amazon released a 3D printer, along with an extensive library of real, useful products that could be printed out-of-the-box, without any difficult setup or calibration, then you might have a product. It would have to be something like, "I unpacked it from the box and plugged it in. And then the next day, I was shopping on Amazon, and along with the option to 'buy' the doodad I wanted for $11, there was an option to 'print' for free! I even got to select my color." That there is a workable business model. Sell the printers, sell the printing material, as well as selling the same products via mail-order for those who don't own a printer.
Of course, there's an obvious objection that occurs to me: Someone might say, "But can you really make a whole Amazon store of objects that can also be printed? Sure, I can print out some crappy little plastic toy, but nobody is going to bother to buy that same thing online!" Well there's your problem right there. If you can't come up with a large selection of real products that can be printed with these things, products which people would otherwise buy from retail/online stores, then the printer is not a consumer product. It's a more of a toy, or a machine that hobbyists can use to produce things, or businesses can use for prototyping or other purposes.
When I can pick up a dishwasher replacement part printed out by Whirlpool at my local kinko's and it costs less and is just as good as a cast one then 3D printing will have arrived. Till then it's for hobbyists and specialist.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Back in the day, my dad knew a guy in the military who thought Microsoft would be big. He said the guy was an idiot. Dude was like, "Look man, computers, pre-packaged software, nobody wants to write their own code!" Dad wrote a voice recognition system on the VIC-20, figured prepackaged software was a no-go industry but computers would be big and everyone would learn to program them.
You're going to see a lot of "My 3D printer is awesome because I can model things and print, and everyone in the world will want to print things they make!" idiocy going around here. 3D printers aren't universal constructors; they can't make high-quality plastic with injection molding or carving or shaping, much less metal and circuits. And even then, it takes specialized processes to make certain materials: you can etch ICs easy enough with a universal fabricator, but what happens when you want an electric-motor-driven ceramic burr coffee grinder? Glass, ceramic (what kind? What grade, what process?), steel (what type?), plastic, screws, basins, lids, hoppers, shafts, bearings. Just working with "metal" is an exercise in working with hundreds of different material--thousands when you start getting into anything like car parts or fountain pens.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
'As soon as people learn that they can print a new battery cover for a remote control, or replace a small broken part of a kid's favorite toy, or some amazing thing no one has yet thought of, they'll start picking up.'
But they can't.
Unless that was your point.
Take your average consumer, and give them a 3d modelling package.
Ask them to make a battery cover.
It needs to fit precisely in the hole - often to +-0.2mm tolerances or it won't slide in right.
It needs to have a properly designed 'spring' or it's going to fall off again.
They don't have an accurate metrology thing that would let them measure the size of the hole.
They are at best inexperienced when trying to run 3d modelling software, much of which is at best challenging to use.
It's going to take most people quite a while before they can actually print something that fits.
This may well be too high a barrier to entry.
Printing things from thingiverse et al is another matter.
At the moment, a 'Customers not impressed with CNC lathes' story would make almost as much sense.
That would have been the headline in the 70s. This is why consumers don't generally drive innovation, and why judging the prospects of a new technology before its had time to overcome some of its early weaknesses is premature.
For just under $2,500 you can buy a MB Replicator 2 or a Type A Series 1; both are decent quality, consumer ready 3D printers.
Both of them excel at slowly making 25 cent plastic parts in a number of hours for about a dime. There is no legit use for the consumer yet. It's still "look mom, I can print plastic spider I just downloaded from Thingiverse!"
Sure, there's designers, engineers and artists that use them. But for the average guy at home? No way.
Anyone who has used a 3D printer (I have a RepRap style one) knows that the killer app is rapid prototyping. Lots of people already use 3D printers to print out prototypes of parts to test them out or focus group them before sending them to production. You pretty much *have* to be a designer to be able to make use of a 3D printer right now, and I'm sorry but 3D CAD software has come a long way but it's too expensive and complicated for a home user. You'd need to come up with a Tony Stark-like CAD system for under $100 before it'll be ready for home use. Meanwhile, those of us who know our way around a CAD program are quite happy with our 3D printers, thank you very much.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Or, you could just continue doing what people do today: tape it back on. Total expense, tenth of a cent. Total time spent, 15 seconds.
If those kinds of things are what people are hanging their visions on, forget it.
These machines are for people who want to build new stuff. They're tools for machinists and others who want to work with wood, plastic or metal. People who have workshop in their garage. i.e. They're tools for people who know they need them. Furthermore, because they're the current "in" thing, they're being used in instances where a CNC milling machine would have been far more appropriate. This stupid crap with 3-D printed guns, for instance.
soylentnews.org
One thing I haven't understood yet from what limited reading I've done on 3D printers (I think I'm a pretty typical consumer in that I have not gone out of my way to learn about them) is what material the printed objects are made of. Can I print a decorative button for my coat? If I can, will it have as much strength as the button I'm replacing? Can I have it printed the same color?
Can I print a coffee mug that I can use? That might be cool - I could put whatever engraving I want on it. But again I'm not sure what material I'm dealing with. Is it waterproof? Is it strong? Is it toxic?
Would I be able to use printed objects as hardware? Are they strong enough to act as screws or screwdrivers?
It might be good for kids. I could replace those missing pieces from various board games. Could I print out new D&D dice?
So far my impression is that you get one material - some sort of resin, and you get one color. I don't think I have that many needs for things made of plastic resin.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.