3-D Printer Firms Fall Flat, as Buyers Wait for New Models
on.wsj.com
on.wsj.com
3D systems was founded in 1986. Stratasys was founded in 1989. These are not toy companies. These companies defined and refined the printing methods we're talking about today. What did their devices print? Engineering prototypes. Cars. Car parts. Medical and research parts. Things that preceded mass production. From cat scan to a hip broach with no room for error.
That kickstarter explosion is a reflection of the hype initially driven by hobbyist interest that brought 3D printing in the forefront some 4-5 years ago. Also fascinating is the RepRap family tree, which identifies the design origin of many of these kickstarter printers: http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap_Family_Tree
So the market, the buyers, are confused because seemingly new printers and 3d printing companies are sprouting like mushrooms after a rain promising faster and cheaper printing for a hundred bucks, and they keep tanking. Failing to deliver. Breaking promises. Consumers don't know many of these are just remixed open-sourced printers or that it takes 8 hours to make a small toy. The product dilution is eroding confidence in the technology and stealing resources from starter companies who are serious and could deliver real products.
And to the two above-mentioned companies, who own patents and keys to the technology, this means their robust product has been massively devalued and confidence in them shaken.
This is exactly the problem with those companies. They had the patents that let them charge $60.000-$100.000 for something that cost less than $2000 to manufacture. They will spend more money sending you a sales representative, or in Shows and parties and fancy buildings.
Everything they sold to you was incredibly expensive, and God help you if your machine breaks.
For 20 something years they had done that and gotten away with it.
But now patents are expiring and they are dinosaurs.
"So the market, the buyers, are confused because seemingly new printers and 3d printing companies are sprouting like mushrooms after a rain promising faster and cheaper printing for a hundred bucks, and they keep tanking. Failing to deliver. Breaking promises. Consumers don't know many of these are just remixed open-sourced printers or that it takes 8 hours to make a small toy. The product dilution is eroding confidence in the technology and stealing resources from starter companies who are serious and could deliver real products."
I don't know what are you talking about. A Prusa Steel takes 30 minutes to mount. You can buy a printrbot, a bukito, a kossel already mounted.
Stealing resources? What? If I device to spend my money whenever I wish after a 20 years monopoly grant ends it is "stealing resources" from those guys?
Most consumers who are interested in 3D printing can't.
This is not a hobbyist product. This is a product for a hobbyist engineer. With some elbow grease and love, it could become a hobbyist product, but an ungodly lot of these kickstarter companies are selling unicorns.
3D printers are in fact booming. Each year the market doubles in size or more, hardly "falling flat".
USD30.000 printers are falling flat, precisely because you can do lots of the things you only could do in $30.000 machines with $1.000 and companies are not stupid.
Imagine someone telling you "computer firms are falling flat" when Apple II appeared, because IBM was loosing market in $1 million mainframes as some people in companies started wondering if those little microcomputer toys maybe could be used just for some things mainframes were used at the time.
"The expected household market for printers hasn’t caught on, despite widespread availability of printers at big-box retailers for under $5,000. Less than 10% of Stratasys’s annual sales come from home users, according to an analyst estimate."
Why don't they ask Brook from printrbot, Josef Prusa or RichRap?.
Of course I won't buy a printer that is not Open Source,a printer I can't improve, has no drivers for my OS, sells me electronic signed filament cartridges at silk price from StrataSys at "for under $5000!!!" when my printrbot simple metal cost me less than $600 and run circles around any cheap stratasys.
I have 3 printers in my house: A printrbot, a Prusa Steel and a delta minikossel, and it is just the beginning, resin 3d printers, good resolution 3d scanners, and CNCs are improving enormously, specially on price side.
This is the Innovator's dilemma. If you don't consider a cheap or toy market that is 10 times bigger than yours in units sold and continue growing as "significant" then you will find yourself on a "kodak moment" soon in the future.
Nvidia was insignificant against Silicon graphics selling toys, until it was not.
1- You have a need for an object you can't pick up at Home Depot, dollar store, etc.
2- You need the skills to model it in a 3-D program and make it suitable for printing.
3- You need to not have the skills to make it some other way- whether in wood, metal, or clay.
I think the combination of 1 and 3 is probably the real killer- all the hobbyist model makers, cosplayers, etc who would have the most use for one already have the skills and tools to make stuff in other ways.
4. 3-D models are available for purchase to instantly print an item in any dimensions you'd like.
2- You need to load your model and press a button that says "print".
3- You can make objects any other way in wood, metal or clay and 3d scan it to make it digital. E.g Cars are regularly designed on clay, and 3d scanned to make a computer model that you can replicate forever and edit in the computer.
I could spend hours carving wood or drilling, milling, lathing it. But all this work has to be replicated if I need another piece. Digitalization means anyone, anywhere could replicate my piece(or analyze in a CAM, CAE program).
https://i.imgur.com/tx3c3Pz.png
If I need a photo, I send the digital images to a printing service and receive a inexpensive high quality prints on professional quality paper, or bound in a coffee table book, or on a mug or birthday cake, etc.
The only time I print anything on my personal 2D printer is when I need it right now. All the while, I hate the experience; it's time consuming and requires expensive consumables.
I expect 3D printing will go the same way. If and when I ever start doing my own personal 3D printing, it will be through an online printing service where I can upload designs and have high quality prints done in various quality materials and shipped to me quickly via Amazon Prime or some other delivery service.
I've seen a lot of DIY folk waste a lot of time on 3D printers. As it currently stands, I think you should expect at least a year, maybe even 2, of your hobby being "building a 3D printer" rather than "building things with a 3D printer" if you get into it.
If you don't want to spend a few thousand dollars (and even the cheap ones you end up spending on, because of the replacements and upgrades you'll need and want to do), don't want to put up with the hassle, then I have three suggestions:
- For simple things, stick to wood-working, it's significantly easier and faster than 3D printing. e.g. if all you need is a box to hold a Raspberry Pi, A) you can probably get a pre-fab box at an arts-and-crafts shop near you, or B) making boxes is not terribly difficult (there will be methods you will have to learn, it's not something you just jump into, but the actual techniques are not that hard).
- For things requiring precise dimensions and non-standard cuts, go with laser cutting. There are a wide variety of materials you can use, and a huge number of very cheap, very fast services you can employ. You basically draw your thing in InkScape or Adobe Illustrator, email it away, wait a day or two, and then glue your thing together. It is very easy and it makes for extremely clean and professional-looking "prototype grade" results.
- If you need the complexity of 3D printing: order from ShapeWays. Don't buy a 3D printer. If not ShapeWays, you might have a local shop that has 3D printing available. They will only charge you for the finished product, they don't charge you for the failures.
At this point in time, with the speed of all 3D printers being so bad, and the reliability of any 3D printer you could own on a single person's budget, there is no point to owning your own 3D printer. If that is going to change anytime in the near future, it will require a few seachanges in how we go about 3D printing. Otherwise, it's waiting for certain patents to expire.
It's not the "you won't get anything done on the first year", but it's also not the "just a week of tinkering" either.
Or cardboard prototyping. Much less technology required, tools are much cheaper (glue gun, segmented knife, ruler, and a mat for cutting the cardboard), material can often be obtained at zero cost, and it's even faster to work with than wood. It can supplement woodworking (or 3D printing) really well.
If anyone is interested in this sort of stuff, check out Adam Savage's "One Day Builds" videos on youtube, they are great examples of the sorts of things you can do with basic tools and ingenuity.
You can see it in their eyes. They walk in the hackerspace and they have this "we're not worthy!" look on their faces. "Stop it!" I'd tell them. The place is nothing without the people in it. The space is not sacred, it is not too good for you to insert yourself.
Laser sintering you have lasers melting metal particulate to form the piece. That goes wrong you end up with nasty consequences.
From the USPTO site: "Patent infringement is the act of making, using, selling, or offering to sell a patented invention...
http://www.uspto.gov/patents-maintaining-patent/patent-litig...
I needed to print, try and tweak parts, if I ordered everything from shapeways my iterations would have been stretched out.
Here is a page I wrote about my experiences:
http://winterstartupchallenge.com/3dprinter.html
The only difficult thing was the calibration, making sure the surfaces were level etc... this could all be drastically improved with better reprap design.
Learning how to design models that could be 3D printed took some time, but now its second nature and basically comes down to not having any overhangs greater than 45 degrees.
I'm really glad I built my 3D printer and have the skillset. My ambition in life is to become what I call Master of the Intelligent Networked Machine, which is a grandiose way of saying I want to have the full skill set to design and build Internet of Things devices, from the hardware to the code.
I think its the most valuable skillset around today and 3D printing is a valuable part of the toolset.
It took me time to build the printer, but in the process I learned about the technology and I immediately saw the possibilities for using it in new and interesting ways. By seeing how a RepRap is built (commodity parts + custom home fabricated parts) it changed the way I designed and built my hardware product.
Becoming a 3D printer master builder only took a couple months and was well worth it.
Sure, it's still all just crappy chunks of plastic, but it's pretty cool to teach my son about the tech of 3D printing in such an engaging way.
1) http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:22244
I volunteer teaching little children to 3d print here in Europe. There is a very active Spanish community. Some of them will do incredible things when they grow up.
The $400 Duplicator produces parts that I immediately put into production. They are very high quality (in appearance, in tolerance, and in strength).
We saw this before when the PC cloners ate IBM's profit margin for lunch.
spare part cost on the market: $50
Spare part cost on printer $5
Spare part cost on market $2.50
Spare part minimum order on market 100000
There's a reason Stratasys is in trouble. Same reason IBM was in trouble after PC clone makers started eating their profit margin for lunch.