Comment Re:Hot Glue Guns (Score 1) 175
a consumer needing one copy of a few trinkets may not pay $1,000 for a printer to produce 30 or 40 goods he could buy for a grand total of $200. If the great many available 3D templates appear which are useful to consumers and cheaper to fabricate than purchase, a 3D printer with low enough cost will appeal to consumers and become a consumer-grade good.
And if it's anything like a paper printer, does it have plastic jams the way we have paper jams? Clogged nozzles? Low "ink" or whatever the consumable is? Driver problems? Compatibility problems between template any my printer? To be fair purchasing is not without its problems either, but mass produced trinkets are usually done better by somebody else. And the odds of cost being lower is close to none, just like it costs way more idea to print your own book on your average home printer than buying it in the store.
The way I see it there's three potential winners: 1) Customization, some form of take your own measurements and adapt a template. 2) Availability, being able to print a part that's out of production. I guess you can add any restricted goods to this category. 3) Speed, I hear they're not speed demons but overnight "delivery" is still pretty fast. And while I might print "anything" on a printer a consumer 3D printer isn't working with metal, wood, leather or textiles it's just plastic trinkets. That's a very limited subset of the items I own.