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OLO, World's First Portable 3D Printer Prints On Top Of Smartphones (hothardware.com)
MojoKid quotes a report from HotHardware: The OLO 3D Printer was first announced in October at the World Maker Faire in New York, where it earned itself an Editor's Choice award and accolades. The developers behind OLO call it a "smartphone 3D printer" as it requires a smartphone to operate. Designs can either be downloaded from the internet from the device, or copied over from a computer once it's created. When placed on a desk, the OLO looks like an inconspicuous little box, but inside, it can craft items up to 400 cm3 in volume. Its developers call the OLO "portable," and it has the specs to match at 1.7 lbs with a physical size of only 6.8" x 4.5" x 5.8." OLO is a unique printer not only because of its small form factor and low price point ($99), but because of its operation. Once the 3D model is loaded, the bottom section of OLO can be placed on top of your phone, and then the resin of your choice is poured inside that structure. You then place the top half of OLO on top and wait a few hours for it to do its thing. The resin hardens by using the light emitted from the smartphone it sits on top of, generated from the OLO app.
1. Bleed. Lots of bleed.
2. Cannot calibrate properly because different phone screens have different intensities and spectra. Even within the same model of phone.
3. Occupies your phone.
4. What advantage does this have over a cheap LCD panel anyway?
5. Resin can offer a superior print quality, if you weren't dealing with photons escaping in the wrong direction, but it's also expensive and hard to get.
6. And offers no consistency in quality control, so good luck using cheap stuff off ebay.
7. Oh, and it has a shelf life.
8. Did they mention it's also moderately toxic when liquid?
9. And that you have to clean those printers out if you want to leave them unused for a while to keep the resin from setting inside them?
10. That's the smallest build area of any printer I've ever seen.
It's a gimmick. I hope that one day a cheaper, more practical resin printer will be introduced for the masses - but this is not that printer. It is certainly an interesting approach though, using an LCD rather than the usual elaborate and expensive multi-laser setup. It just needs to be done in a form that isn't quite so ridiculously cheap - corners are cut getting a design that cheap to manufacture that you can't even afford an LCD panel, and have to instead pretend the omission of a vital component is somehow a feature.
You just make sure that the first thing you print is another smartphone. Set your phone to airplane mode while doing so. Once you have the duplicate phone, since it's not on a plan, you don't need to worry about it getting any calls; use it to print subsequent models.
Don't forget to take your phone back out of airplane mode. Once you start selling all those duplicate phones, you'll want to make sure your customers can reach you.