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Just when you feel you’ve gotten comfortable with a new technology – from desktop computers to laptops to tablets, for example – along comes something to render it obsolete. If you haven’t yet heard of 3D printers, then you soon will. To put it simply, a 3D printer is like a hot glue gun attached to a robotic arm. Available for domestic or commercial use, 3D printers ‘print’ a 3D model of a design as instructed by the computer attached to them. Currently, they mainly print objects made out of plastic, but there are some in use that work with metal, biological tissue, ceramics and food. When you consider the huge advances made in computing technology since their invention sixty years ago, the possibilities of 3D printing are truly staggering.
Currently, the 3D printing economy stands at $2.2 billion dollars per year. They are mainly used in industry – however, 68,000 consumer printers have already been sold. The Cube 3D printer, for example, is a sleek home gadget and costs around $1299, plus $49 for each cartridge of plastic – these are similar to ink cartridges. They look a little like sewing machines and work with MacBooks.
At the moment, 3D printers are still fairly complicated to use, plus the designs they ‘print’ are often crude. For a fascinating online article, check out the piece A.J. Jacobs -the editor of Esquire – wrote in the New York Times about a 3D dinner he created for him and his wife. Jacobs set out to produce a meal that was entirely created with a 3D printer – including the plates, the cutlery and the food itself.
Companies such as Shapeways are also getting in on the act by creating a range of materials and designs for domestic printing use. At the moment, it still takes a long time for a 3D product to be ‘printed’: a single fork, for example, takes up to four hours to be ‘printed’. The process of watching an item created, however, is truly fascinating and it won’t be long before you are saying to your family: “Your dinner’s in the printer”, instead of “Your dinner’s in the oven” or printing out toys for your children to use. Once the prices come down, 3D printers could be set to take off in an extraordinary way!