Editorials / Opinions
The 3D Printing Octagon
A few years ago I started to think of 3D printing as a triangle where you had to control for each part of the delta: software, machines, and materials. I’ve now come to realize that it is more complex still. In order to get true repeatability, reliability and...
Joris Column: Printcrime, augmenting humans, nanoconvergence and Segway polo
Often only a few years separate the tinfoil hats from the millionaires to be. I was writing the piece on the Youbionic arm and thinking of how we will use 3D printing to augment human beings. Clearly augmenting the human body with mechatronics would be a good idea....
We Have to Take a Stand on 3D Printed Guns
We as a 3D Printing community to take a stand on 3D printed guns. I don’t know where you stand politically on the gun debate, nor do I care. We must as a 3D printing industry collectively respond to the issue of getting dragged into the gun debate. We are being...
What Does BASF’s Investment in Materialise Mean for the 3D Printing Industry?
Earlier on today BASF invested $25 million into Materialise. We speculated that perhaps BASF wanted to conquer the eyewear market because the potential of this market is so vast. We won’t sure what this investment means for both firms for many years. What is...
An Editorial Farewell and a Welcome
Since its inception in early 2014, 3DPrint.com and its team have been dedicated to providing news and insights focused on 3D technologies, offering an ever-growing variety of resources to the industry. Over the last four and a half years, we have published close to...
Industrial 3D Printer Buying Guide 2018
Industrial 3D printers are used for manufacturing. Reliability, uptime and repeatability are very important to these systems. The availability of the printer and the throughput are key considerations on whether to buy one. Industrial 3D printers have a wide range of...
3D Printer Buying Guide 2018
Since our buying guide last year, a lot has changed in 3D Print-Land. More functional desktop 3D printers have emerged, and a slew of competitors entered the low-cost 3D printing space. All of this competition is good for you, the 3D printer buyer. It may also be very...
Ocean’s 8 and Lingering Hollywood 3D Printing Hype
There are a lot of things Hollywood doesn’t get right, and since its popular heyday of consumer hype earlier this decade, 3D printing has certainly figured among those things. With more realism settling in among the 3D printing industry itself as the technology...
Five Steps 3D Printing Service Bureaus Should Take to Keep Their Customers and Grow Their Business
Now is a great time to start a 3D printing service bureau! Over the past decade, many independent shops were acquired and there was significant industry consolidation. But recently, new players like Carbon, HP, and Desktop Metal have joined the fray and have already...
The Future of Open Source Desktop 3D Printers
A few weeks ago a spat erupted between popular low-cost 3D printer manufacturer Creality and 3D printing retailer Printed Solid. This public spat highlights some of the core issues affecting the 3D printing community today. In short most “open source” 3D...
Breaking The Boundaries Of 3D Printing
The 3D Printing industry should take note: just as Heston Blumenthal has transformed traditional concepts of what is possible with culinary ingredients, Ultimaker’s Senior Materials Engineer Diana Garcia-Alonso is cooking up a similar storm from the company’s...
Guide to Selecting and Buying 3D Printing Filament in 2018
Your priority was likely finding the right 3D printer to match your requirements and budget. But what often gets less attention is the filament you feed through it. After all, plastic is just plastic, right? So it would make sense to just find something that’s...
3D Printing Crime, The Dark Web, Bitcoin and The King of Queens
That 3D printing could be used for crime was already on many people’s minds years ago. Law enforcement agencies have been learning about 3D printing for the past few decades in order to discover how it can be used for crime. Whereas the popular media has focused...
Kim Kardashian Lookalike Immortalized in Partly 3D Printed Cake
I have made no secret of the fact that I find edible reproductions of people’s faces to be extraordinarily creepy. I do not want people on my cake. Therefore, in my opinion, the cake that broke the Internet (it didn’t, mine’s still working) is the...
When the Lights Go Out: The Untold Story of Type A Machines
At the end of January 2018, Type A Machines announced that it was closing its doors for good. DesignBox3D CEO Preet Jesrani shares his perspective on what happened, having worked closely with the company for years. I first contacted Type A Machines in 2014, having...
3D Printing, Nature, and the Industry Renaissance
A revolution marks a sea change, a hard resetting of the status quo; a renaissance is, literally, a rebirth. While a revolution is typically relatively short in duration and punctuated by some fundamental shift that changes a paradigm, often political, a renaissance...
Making Your Own Goods and Products At Home: When Will Every Home in America Have a 3D Printer?
3D printing technology has helped to create everything from custom prosthetics and medications, and concrete bridges and buildings, to parts for cars and planes, as well as personalized pizza, athletic shoes, and jewelry. While many of these items weren’t...
What Possibilities Does the Future Hold for 3D Printed Construction?
There is no doubt that 3D printing will impact the design and production of buildings, whether residential or commercial. Efforts are underway to understand how traditional building materials, techniques, and aesthetics can be impacted through the introduction of 3D...
How Much Will The University Tuition Be For My Robot Love Child?
What will the future bring us? Will technology save or damn us? In the past antidotes to techno-optimism could readily be found in Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Decades ago they had peered into our murky futures and what they saw was: emerging dystopia. Huxley saw...
Will Google’s Downloadable 3D Objects Help or Hinder 3D Printing?
Google just released an experimental version of Article, a 3D viewer for AR. The viewer lets you on your desktop or in the browser: look at, manipulate or view 3D models. Article also works with AR (augmented reality) – in an AR capable browser on a device the...
3D Printers: The Death of Monochrome Display
When releasing a new 3D printer model, manufacturers wonder what screen they should put in their printers. Let’s discuss what features make a good screen and what options manufacturers have: Many desktop 3D printers still come with monochrome LCDs. When I see them, it...
What the Apple 3D Printing Patents Mean for Our Industry
Recently Apple has been granted a patent for a color 3D printing idea whereby the printed object is first made and then colored in afterwards. This idea is a straightforward one; using it one could print an object using FDM for example and then later color it with an...
The 3D Printing Race is on for 2018: Functional Materials for Orthodontic Aligners and More
After 15 years in the 3D printing business, our team at EnvisionTEC has seen a lot of trends come and go, and we’re excited about what we see on the horizon. While we can’t disclose much of our behind-the-scenes work with customers, we continue to see manufacturers...
10 of the Most-Read 3D Printing Stories of 2017
At 3DPrint.com, we publish a lot of stories over the course of a year; 2,500 in 2017. As the news comes in and goes out to our readers, we take note of what trends are happening in the 3D printing world, but we can never fully predict which stories are going to stand...
Shapeways CEO Speaks Out For Net Neutrality
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), headed by the uniquely irritating Ajit Pai, recently voted to overturn Obama-era net neutrality regulations. This is not particularly surprising given the current president’s manic desire to remove everything...
