3/17 Wall Street Journal reviews three or four 3d printers all under $400.00 Article is by Geoffrey Fowler. If you do a search using his name you can access the article.
I’ll wait for CLIP (Continuous Liquid Interface Production) technology to trickle down to the modeler level. It makes 3D printers look like ancient history! Google Carbon3D printer. Producing parts this way will be unreal!
The Carbon3D machine will probably be much too expensive for individuals. But as long as places like i.materialize and Shapeways have them, there’s really no need to have one on your desk. And the fact that it’s so much faster than current printers will hopefully mean that the cost of printing will go down significantly.
The action figures in this commercial were done on the Carbon3D machine…
Steve S
I saw one last year in action for $1200.00. I am sure they will go down in price, could not beleive they were selling home models not that long after they became common knowlege.
That was probably a filament extrusion machine. The Carbon3D is a completely different technology with far superior finish.
Steve S
No it was not, it had a pool of liquid and a laser solidifed the material. MSRP is $1500.
That’s an SLA machine, probably this one…
The Carbon3D CLIP process is similar to SLA, but rather than printing in discrete layers, they describe it as a continuous growth process. The result is a much better finish without the layering. Here’s a pic comparing the two…
http://3dprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/clip6.jpg
Steve S
Steve
I didn’t even know that SLA printers existed. Although the CLIP process is superior to either SLA or traditional 3D printing methods, SLA seems to be a reasonable compromise between price and accuracy. I can see SLA printers in modelers homes in the near future, especially if prices continue to fall.
Some guy named Junior Veloso made an impressive SLA machine. He tried a crowd-funding campaign but couldn’t raise enough capital to take it to market. From what I recall, the digital projector he used was pretty pricey. Apparently the project is dead.
Here’s an old blog mention about it…
http://3dprintingblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/check-this-out-sla-goes-home-made.html
Steve S
Carbon has released their CLIP technology printer. When I said that it would be too expensive for individuals, that was an understatement! The machine costs $40,000 per year. Even a millionaire wouldn’t want to keep shelling out that much year after year.
Only four printing services currently have the printers: CIDEAS, Sculpteo, The Technology House, and WestStar Precision. Notice that Shapeways isn’t on the list. Sculpteo hasn’t yet stated minimum thicknesses and sizes.
Steve S
Sculpteo has finally released the specs for the CLIP printer. Minimum wall thickness is 0.25mm, which is better than Frosted Ultra Detail from Shapeways at 0.3mm. But the minimum detail size is 0.5mm, which is considerably worse than the 0.1mm for FUD. This doesn’t bode well for detailing body shells and such. Things like rivets, bolt heads, hinges, and latches would need details smaller than 0.5mm. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what people are able to do with this.
http://www.sculpteo.com/en/materials/clip-resin-material/
Steve s