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Comment by ibash | Hacker News Reader

3d printers haven’t changed that much… they’ve gotten easier to use, sure, but the materials and quality we’re printing is about the same as 10 years ago.

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3d printers have changed significantly. They used to be very finicky and hard to get a decent print. Lots of tweaking and it was different for every printer.

They have evolved into true click and forget machines.

I tear apart medical and other machines to recycle parts. I do often see 3d printed parts inside commercial machines, probably because they are making so few of them and it's more economical to just print a couple specialized parts.

How can you tell that they're 3d printed? Because they don't have a part number or the manufacturer's name and logo on them?

I don't have a 3d printer myself so maybe it'd be obvious if I printed some.

Most 3D printed parts have a telltale texture resulting from the layer-by-layer deposit of material. The same goes for many milled/CNCed parts bearing evidence of tool marks. Once you've seen and held enough, it's relatively easy to identify whether a given part was printed, cast, milled, lathed, etc.

I say most because there are finishing methods which can largely obscure these details and make it less obvious as to which method produced a given part.

They had the layer lines you see on FDM prints.

Maybe it was 20? I just remember they took expense fluids, hard to keep, fragile. Then month ago I was in a Micro Center, and there were dozens of very fancy printers that could take dozens of types of line feeds.

Feels like 3D printers have changed. A slicer from 10 years ago is not going to generate as good a print as one from today. And it feels like the variety of filaments from 10 years ago has greatly changed.

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