The Carbon3D printer pulls complex shapes out of a dish of plastic

The article slants like stereolithography is a difficult to achieve ("magical") tech and these guys are pioneering some new kind of revolutionary product but I'm pretty sure outfits like Formlabs were doing this years ago (and now many others; see kickstarter). I didn't see it on my skim through but have they developed some revolutionary improvement to the old UV developer resin and projector technique?

The two current biggest issues with thermoplastic 3D printers are:

- electricity usage: heating a baseplate, feed head and mechanical effort of moving a massive apparatus bazillion^3 times.

- speed (or lack thereof) of moving one or two heads those bz^3 times to get anything made

We're still in the "horse-and-buggy"-days of distributed manufacturing, so one approach or another will eventually find something scalable, Edison-style. More inventions and approaches are definitely a good-thing.