"First $200 3D printer" Topic

At least that I have seen. Described as not high quality, but once one is available for this price others will follow.

link

I guess I'd like to know how much the plastic costs also.
Ink print cartridges are pricey. I can only imagine how much the plastic for these 3D printers will cost. That would be part of my decision to get one.

I think MY use would mainly be for buildings and some other terrain features. So real high definition isn't necessarily needed. But if it costs more to "print" a building than it does to buy a resin one, I'll stick with the status quo for now.

Plastic, $16 USD per kilo. No idea how much "printing" that allows.

I doubt that the DPI will be suitable for the average gamer, let alone a discerning one.

Check out the second video with the figure sculp. Looks pretty good to me. Not museum quality but I can see a use for it for terrain items and wrecks.

VR
James Mattes

Can you throw bad "castings" back in the hopper?

Printing records???

> Can you throw bad "castings" back in the hopper?

Perhaps, one of the issues with the $200 USD printer vs the $300 USD ones is that the plastic it uses melts at a lower temperature (watch the hot cars in the summer?)

Looks like they are also working on/selling something called the Ramen which takes plastic pellets and extrudes the filament the makibox uses. I guess you would need to be able to grind/crush up the unwanted extrusions into compatible size pellets.

Printing records???

Too cheap to buy another "Dark Side of the Moon"?

No – too high to remember where the other copy is.

darthfozzywig made me laugh.

> Can you throw bad "castings" back in the hopper?

Doubt it. Most of the 3D printers use some sort of resin based process. Converting that back into usable medium isn't usually possible.

The big kicker is going to be the design side. A 3D printer without CAD designs is a fancy (and expensive) doorstop. And, trust me, even the simplest CAD program has a nasty learning curve.

And, trust me, even the simplest CAD program has a nasty learning curve.

The wife — a professional digital artist — has been cursing and swearing as she's learning Blender. The fully-functional software packages have gotten really expensive lately, except for Blender, while decent 3d printers are closing in on small business prices.

That said, I do have a copy of Verto Studio on my iPad that I'm slowly trying out. I'm not sure that a tablet is the right device for it, though — context switching is really clunky.

G'Day

An up coming release of Blender (2.67) is going to have a 3D Printing Tool Kit. (I'm currently teaching myself to use Blender as well)

Cheers

Derek

I'll pass, since I doubt it will meet the required output quality.

since I doubt it will meet the required output quality

Probably right, Mako, but not so long ago these things were pretty much the stuff of science-fiction; then they were in existence but at a ridiculous price. Now they are very cheap, amd the quality can only improve, even if the price remains the same.

This is the first cheap 3D printer, think of it as being a bit like this printer :

We'll have to wait some time before we get the glitzy high-end quality laser equivalent.

Blender has terrible usability. Its the WordPerfect of 3D modeling tools.