Toys and Sculptures are fun, but imagine being able to use this in a setting like a hardware store. "You need an obscure fitting for some niche piece of machinery that's been out of production for years? Sure, I'll print it right up". No need to keep stocks. With some CAD skillz, it could also lead to a whole new phase of home prototyping among makers.

Meh, sounds no more interesting than those wax sculpture machines at the zoo that make an animal figurine. There's only so much you can do with a slab of plastic.

custom "adult" toys on demand.

how much do the ink cartridges cost? :)

Sure, very cool. I want one for that reason alone. But I think it's nearly useless for most people, including me. It's profoundly limited by the material, being one specific type of plastic. Nevermind its inability to assemble complex moving parts.

I'd be curious to see if it could produce Vinyl Urban Toys. I had to send out to China in order to get a Vinyl figure I designed produced and it had minimum order requirements of 3000 units (making the production price around $4500 (considering I did the 3d and resin sculpture myself). If this could produce vinyl figures, Id be in the market for one immediately.

The printer "builds robust, composite plastic parts" but "the maximum build volume of the initial product will be 5 x 5 x 5 inches". Well, there goes my idea for a custom dildo factory. I suppose my only market for now (until they can increase the size of said product) would be asia.

I've been waiting for this for about 10 years now. Finally the price is getting there. Of course in a couple more years these printers should be even cheaper and better, so perhaps I can wait just a little longer.

As someone who builds r/c planes this would be very useful to me. I'm always needing something like an odd-shaped motor mount.

Also there's a large number of items around the house that I've had to throw away because some little plastic part has broken and can't be glued.

You've got to remember it will probably take around 8-10 hours to build most parts and they require a lot of sanding and painting to make them useable.

Still I'm glad to see these things coming down in price since I send stuff out for rapid prototyping pretty frequently.

On a serious note, imagine on of these 60 foot by 60 foot, come in sections via semi truck that came be assamble on site. Then have it build you a custom house frame. Move it to the next location. Add drywall, wiring, plumbing and vala, rapid custom house!

I hope they work better than the pic indicates... looks like the guy wanted some kind of technology device but is getting a duck :-)

Call me when they perfect it at making a reliable but inexpensive whore, um, I mean girlfriend.

There's a website that will do this. I wish I could remember the name of it, but I know they exist. I read about it in Wired several months ago. From what I recall, they have a CAD-like interface which you can use to design almost anything you can dream up. You specify materials, dimensions, etc. During the entire design process, an estimated price quote is always available. As you add or subtract more complicated cuts or expensive materials, the price automatically adjusts itself. Then, when you're done, you click "print", enter payment info, and wait for your new, entirely custom-made, product to arrive in the mail. It's a 3D printer.

It sounded like an incredibly awesome service, and as soon as I read the article, I started thinking about what I needed made, and why I needed it. I couldn't come up with anything, so I never looked into further, and now can't remember the site.

But it's out there; check Google, or maybe Wired.com.

Although this model is limited, it is pretty clear these things are going to be the unexpected cool shit of the future. Different homebrew polymers shouldn't be so hard to use.

@ Terry in St. Paul

The maximum length is the diagonal of the cube so your 5x5x5 cube could make an "adult toy" 8.66 inches long. Btw, nice racist asian joke.

Are the parts printed out of it recyclable? I hope so, or else watch out for the tons of new waste if this ever become mainstream.

That's one expensive plastic duck!

We need a 3D printer that can print itself. Then the price would really drop!

For 5K you can make something out of plastic no bigger then 5x5x5. Wowie.

"Dude you broke the bong again!"

"To the 3-D printer!"

@jeffnj:
the website you're thinking of is probably emachineshop.com

I worked with a small 5-axis mill that wasn't too much bigger than this a couple years ago. It was about 5x as expensive but you could do anything from wax to clay to balsa and even aluminum with it. At the time we used it to do CAD renderings of pine derby cars.

Huygir:

HA!!!!!!

While I hear the complaints about the 5-in-cube size restriction, I am quickly reminded that the first printer my parents had was tractor-feed, black-and-white (not grayscale), and a couple technology rungs below dot-matrix, with exactly 2 supported fonts. I'm sure it wasn't $5000, but I'm equally sure it wasn't cheap. Twenty-five years on, you can buy a sheet-fed, color inkjet with 300+ dpi resolution for well under a hundred dollars, and you throw it out when it's out of ink.

I look forward to seeing where things stand in ten or twenty years.

I do recall that the US Navy was looking into this sort of tech to replace repair parts on, say, aircraft carriers. That hinged on the ability to print parts using some variety of metallic base material, so I would imagine it didn't pan out to the Navy's satisfaction (the parts so created would probably not be durable enough for most of the applications they'd be interested in). If you're just after obscure parts for obscure machinery, though, it might be a good start to a lost-wax type casting for a replacement.

deepdish and TerryinSt.Paul have it right: the true market for this thing is "custom" adult toys.

Now, all we need is an affordable 3D scanner for scanning in *certain body parts.*

And as The Lab pointed out, that 5" cube gives us an 8.5" diagonal to work with. Booyah!

impressive, except, apparently when i try to make some sort of mp3 player case, it makes ducks... i can see the girlfriend finding some new 'toy' you make and this suddenly becomes the new "i wasnt visiting that site honey, i swear! it was one of those Pop-Ups!"

Saw this 3D printer a while back. When I have a spare $40k laying around I pick it up. Plus this one prints in a substance that you can then cast metal with.

http://www.zcorp.com/products/printersdetail-450.asp?ID=1<...

5 grand for a duck, where do I sign up!!

Once I get one of these, I'm definitely cranking out all my lost LEGO pieces.

I might sell better if it had a built in MP3 player and digital camera. Hey, it works for all the other crap they sell...

This is interesting as the next cheapest 3D printer currently is in the $20,000 range.
As someone who has used every rapid-prototyping method over the last 12 years I will say that I'm a little skeptical. They are a new company and I'm not sure what the "drum" technology is they are talking about.
They mention .010 build resolution, I would bet on 2.5X that in real life. I also have my doubts on how durable the parts will be. I would think that you wouldn't want to make toy's for your kids as most prototype parts come back broken from Marketing. :) Many RP materials as carcinogenic too, but I bet their stuff is a ABS type material.
Another slick use to to make molds from the part you make in the machine. ABS isn't very good at this because it doesn't burn out easily. They would need to use another material for this.
In the last few years the materials used for these machines have been dropping and the software has several open source versions so that could drop the price. Also Asian sourcing could dramatically lower the price(I think most machines are produced in low volume in 1st world countries).

Depending on how fine of detail this can manage, this could be come the greatest thing ever for scale modelers. Not only would it allow for extremely accurate parts, but it would allow one person to create a part and share it with others.

must have one... as a 3d designer, id give my blood for one

@huygir: That's exactly what I thought when I saw the picture!

the platform is a little limiting, but for $5k it is a almost consumer pricepoint. It's not real specific on the material it uses. Most of these printers have to use more brittle materials because of the way they harden. It claims 50 cents per cubic inch, but that sounds low. I know the 3d printer we have at work uses both a wax support and polymer material, and each tube is around $60/$100 respectively. So printer cost is really irrelevant. Not to mention the cost of service (yes these things can break fairly easy, or get clogged up).

This is like someone offering me my own personal pottery kiln. I've been around these types of devices for many years. They have traditionally be used for "rapid prototyping". Car makers would feed 3-D AutoCAD files into them and WHAMMO...a model of a new cylinder head. (A lot cheaper than the old method of modeling it in wax and machining a metal prototype.) I've also seen such machines used to prototype everything from toys to weapons. This is definitely cool stuff. Though, I'm not sure the world is quite ready for it...especially at the cost. This is still going to be an engineer/designer tool for a while.

On a serious note, imagine on of these 60 foot by 60 foot, come in sections via semi truck that came be assamble on site. Then have it build you a custom house frame. Move it to the next location. Add drywall, wiring, plumbing and vala, rapid custom house!

I wonder how patents and copywrites would be affected by this. Since any object can be cloned.

$5k is about 90% cheaper than last year's model. I wonder when the 3d scanners will come down in price similarly.

I think I will wait for the RepRap to be finished. Once it gets done it will be able to not only print such things, but also make more of itself for your friends! (all non printable parts would be easy to find locally) And the cost would be around $400!

http://reprap.org/

Neat but I would still prefer a good and home level affordable CNC, waterjet, or stereolithography apparatus.

Okay, for the life of me I can't remember the name but there was a book published in the last couple years where the author's premise is that folks are getting tired of mass produced products - that we will move towards making our own goods just for the uniqueness of it. Society has gone so far towards relying on mass produced goods (mainly driven by price point) that we look at artisans and crafts folk as dying breeds and novelties. ("Wow, you know how to make your own furniture? Crazy! I just go to the store.")

With the surge of popularity of such things like Make magazine and just the hacking community I am glad to see that people are getting back to making and tinkering with things just for the joy of being creative. I personally get tired of people equating technologically oriented (ie. engineers) with dispassionate uncreativeness ("I am glad I am an architect, because I can create things but not be drab and utilitarian like you engineers.")

What I look forward to is when these type of printers will start using/laying down different materials instead of just a single uniform plastic. Even adjustments to the plastic can provide differences in material properties.

There's always Fab@Home which is a 3d printer for around... $2500. It's open-source open-hardware, and there are companies selling all the parts as a kit so you don't even have to do any fabbing yourself (just a bit of work assembling it). A cheap way to go - now.

i think the real question is what kind of materials can you "print" with? I mean there's lots of stuff I would want made out of rubber / nylon, but what if I want to change? and what about the excess material that wasn't "printed"?