3D printers: printing out your virtual ideas into reality

Most people didn’t even dare think it possible, printing out 3D computer models into real objects, but it was the requirement of those designing new products to have a faster and cheaper way of having a prototype made to remove eventual design flaws and impress potential investors with. Many technologies were created for many different purposes, such as printing out full colour 3D prototypes with the inkjet printing system, the cheapest of them all, or creating prototyped parts which can clip on one another, and have moving parts inside, to form valves, suspension systems and other functional part prototypes.

Machines making this possible cost around 15,000$, which is quite cheap when compared to the more standard way of achieving 3D prototypes, stereolithography, which cost more than 100,000$, although some special applications still require it, such as making master patterns for various forms of production by molding. For personal use a solution is still being developed, and is supposed to cost 5000$ once finished, which would be the cheapest price for a 3D printer ever. However, you shouldn’t neglect the cost of the materials from which the machines create the objects, as well as the cost of maintaining such systems, since high powered lasers’ and durable precise mechanics’ cost is still too high and their durability too low to be called “home printers”.

But small businesses can now afford such technological marvels should they aid it in doing work faster and cheaper. Just imagine, it is now possible to use a 3d scanner to scan an object into the computer, perhaps make some customizations and print out a fully functional replica with new features, adding which to the product would have taken weeks of work by many people before. Amazing. Toy producers won’t know what hit them when this technology gets just a little bit cheaper, and children start creating their own personal toys at their home computer and printing them at their local 3D printing shop, just as we do our photographs today. Everyone can now have their idea printed into a real object.