3D Printing

The first Apple LaserWriter was really a big pioneer in 2-D printing.  In 1985 it cost $7,000 USD.  What you got was basically a single-side 300 DPI black and white printing device.  It took several seconds to print one page after it warmed up.

This was the first printing device I bought for commercial use.

Certainly there were other printers in those days - large, fast impact printers attached to mainframe-type computers - but this was the first device someone in a small business could actually (barely) afford to purchase.

Today a new revolution in printing is occurring.  This time for 3D printing.

3D printing is used in manufacturing and design and is really about creating prototypes - for example, designing a new building for a client or creating a mock-up of a part used in manufacturing.  Basically anything that involves a "design" element - rules, lines, 3D spaces, etc.

But these days 3D printing is not just for that. 

Microsoft released a product for the XBox called Kinect.  Kinect is a a small USB-based peripheral device that creates 3D views of the space around it.  The image above left is the output of a Kinect box described this article.  Basically it contains a couple of depth-sensitive cameras (among other things) that allow it to not only capture an image but to also calculate how far away each point in the image is from the camera.

Using this information a program on the host computer can calculate an image like you see above that shows not only color but distance as well.

So given a Kinect, some design software and a 3D printer you can start to not just image things but also make them.

Commercial 3D printers can cost $12,000 USD and up but today you can also build your own for around $1,000 USD.  For example, there is the Marketbot (video) which is a home-brew, open source 3D printer which you can build yourself.

There are also commercial 3D printers coming from companies like HP, e.g., the $15,000 USD DesignJet (see this link).

Plugging the cost of that $7,000 LaserWriter from 1985 into this site yields a cost today of just around $15,000 USD for that same device today.  But as I wrote in October of last year (see "Returning to Greatness") the rate at which the cost of things drops today is much faster than in 1985.

So its not unreasonable to assume that within a few years it should be possible to have, for example, phones and home printers that take, manage and print 3D images just as inexpensively as 2D cameras and printers do today.

Things like the Urbee Hybrid car are already being manufactured using printed 3D parts.

And 3D camcorder, say the Aiptek 3D-HD High Definition 3D Camcorder, retails for about $160 dollars today - so can consumer-accessible 3D printing be far behind?

The only real problem I can see is what kids and lawyers will do with this new technology.

The aftermath of a wild office party will no longer be left in the copier output bin for the cleaning people to find - soon there will be 3D souvenirs to take home to unhappy spouses.  And image the fun the kiddies will have transforming "sexting" into a 3D art form...