A question about personal 3D printers.

[Voshizle@gmail.]

Here's a question to all the folks that do digital sculpts and have them printed or better yet, print themselves. Is there any merit to a little tabletop printer like this one:

http://store.makerbot.com/makerbot-thing-o-matic.html

I'm just wondering if it would be a worthy investment it someone wanted to (for example) just print parts of a sculpt, i.e. hands, head, weapons, etc.

[sjensen]

I know very little about 3d printers but from what I have read and seen, the quality is probably not going to be high enough for someone wanting to print a sculpture.


This might be of interest:
http://www.bitsfrombytes.com/content/bfb-3000-0

Again, I'm not sure the quality is going to be good enough but it looks like to does the best quality stuff I've seen for something that is affordable.

I'd be interested to hear the opinions of people with a bit more experience.

Makerbot doesn't print at a high enough detail level for statue stuff, you'd have to do a LOT of prepping to get the pieces ready (sanding/etc...).

There are higher res printers but it's still a super early adopter area right now. Me and my buddy own one together and while it's higher quality than the Makerbot stuff, it still requires a good amount of finishing work.

I'd say in 2-5 years you'll start seeing high quality/somewhat affordable models.

[Voshizle@gmail.]

Nice thanks for the input fellas.