I think you're mistaking "what you want" for "what everyone wants". So while I agree that these press release tend to hand-wave over the difference between "printing in wood" and "printing in PLA with wood powder mixed in", I disagree with the idea that these composite materials aren't valid or interesting.

These sort of composite printing materials aren't very interesting from a structural perspective, because the mixed in particles aren't structural.

But they can have other interesting properties. For example, stainless steel and iron mixed into filament makes the filament look like metal, and magnets will stick to it. Mixing conductive materials in can yield (mildly) conductive 3d prints. Mixing wood in gives a material that feels and looks like wood. Bronze particles make the print look like bronze, and be extremely heavy. Heck, glow-in-the-dark is similarly a powder mixed into a base material. So is fire resistance. There are a near-infinite number of materials that are mixed into plastic to affect color, hardness, fire resistance, feel, ... all that's new is that people are figuring out how to take techniques from injection molding and casting of plastics and apply them to 3D printing. And that's a good thing!

And while you might only care about the structural properties, it's entirely legitimate that others might care about appearance, feel, weight, magnetism, glowing, etc.

Good points, Mr. Anonymous! Product positioning based on price sensitivity is probably what drives it. That is, there are plenty of products in the market already, but Sony saw an opportunity for the higher-end MP3 player than what's in the market, so even though it's by definition a smaller market, it's a better business opportunity than competing directly at the low-end (the dirt-cheap generic MP3 players) or the mid-range (Apple).

Feel free to contribute some actual facts to the discussion. Posting anonymously and making unsupported vague assertions doesn't really advance the discussion.

True.

But the stations have nearly wiped out news reporting. It's all done as cheaply as possible, because they view "news" as overhead required by the FCC as a technicality. It's been a long time since they considered it a responsibility (which it is legally). The FCC should pull some station's licenses, since they're not doing what they should to be granted access to the public airwaves.

Me, too. It was cheaper for me to get fantastic internet (100 Mbps), Netflix, Hulu and iTunes, than it was to pay the ever-inflating cable TV bill.

I agree, but keep in mind that there's still plenty of good scripted programming being produced. The big difference, IMO, is that there's a near-unlimited number of channels these days (not even counting the internet) so there's a ton of other stuff. Game shows, and "reality" programming, are both very cheap to produce, and are a way to fill out programming hours profitably. But if you ignore the stuff you don't like, there's plenty of great original stuff being produced. And a lot of great older stuff is cheaply available now (Netflix, Hulu) that used to only be in boxed sets or occasional reruns.

Or you're a customer who likes cable TV, but is pissed off because the cable companies have been jacking up prices much faster than inflation (http://www.ibtimes.com/cable-tv-bills-outpace-inflation-cablevision-nations-highest-1661698), and who hate the terrible service, but because they almost always have monopoly status granted to them (by the city, or the building owner) there's no competition to drive down prices and improve service.

So yes, they could opt out entirely. But it's unreasonable that's the only option - there should be some competitive options to give customers some way to get a deal that doesn't suck for them.

Yep. Or by analogy, the cable companies could price the "a la cart" model that they're being forced to offer so horribly that everyone "upgrades", paying more than they did before, but with more complex product pricing.

Amazon Prime is _fantastic_ for filament. There are many suppliers, the review system lets you weed out the bad products, and you get free 2-day shipping. The free shipping is the "deal maker" for me - buying through other channels it often it costs as much as the filament to get it shipped quickly!

Keep in mind that you're not really buying "Amazon Filament" you're getting DeltaMaker, or MakerBot, or Taulman3D or eSUN, or Octave, etc. - Amazon is just a sales channel, and doing "pick, pack and ship" of the product. So you need to pay attention to the supplier!

It's true that a printer that extrudes plastic can only make plastic things. But I think that there are many use cases beyond "expand your action figure universe, or fully equipt your doll house".

Yes, you could limit your 3D printing to toys (and toys can be fun), but it can be a lot more.

For example, 3D printed prosthetics (http://enablingthefuture.org) really change people's lives. And I've saved a fortune printing replacement parts that manufacturers wanted many, many hundreds of dollars for. And, of course, there's the creative and aesthetic ability to make anything that unleashes creativity, which has great value. And now that you can (for example) 3D print a statue that really looks and feels like Bronze, or iron, or stainless steel, or wood, it's even better! And if all you care about are the "functional" aspects, there are also materials, like Taulman3D's filament, with amazing strength, clarity, flexibility, etc., which people are using for 3D printing with very real world medical and engineering applications. There are things that are being 3D printed, like a strong, light flying wing with the motor and solar cells inside the wing, that couldn't reasonably be manufactured other ways.

This device http://tunell.us/ detects filament tangles, jams, and end-of-filament, and pauses the print. The price is pretty reasonable, given the stress reduction.

Note that it cannot detect cases where the print fails but filament continues to feed. So you still need to keep an eye out on your print. But it certainly reduces the stress involved in hitting the end of a spool of filament.

What I wrote was the opposite of that - I said that Apple, like all similar companies, documents the total storage precisely, and says that user available storage is less. The exact user storage varies by OS version, options enabled (some consume storage), fonts installed, apps, etc.

Keep in mind that iOS 8 is 1 GB, so it's not like (for example) the MS Surface, which uses 27 GB of storage for the OS and standard apps.

To be clear, FlashForge is based on the open source Replicator 1 designs, so while it's certainly "cloning", it's entirely legal for them to do so, so IMO it's not "ripping off" MakerBot.

Printing with mixed in particles has been going on a while - Laywood, BronzeFill, etc., have been happening over the last year or two, from a number of companies. So now MBI is doing it, too. And it's entirely possible that MBI is OEM-ing filament from those companies to sell under their label, as companies do that sort of thing all the time, because it's often smarter to do a deal (and rapidly/easily make money selling product) than to spend time/money engineering a competing product. So no reason to assume that they're "ripping off" anyone.

Nope, they filed patents on their original work, citing community created inventions as "prior art". People are reading the patents incorrectly and are interpreting the prior art section as if it's the claim - easy to do, as patents are pretty hard to read - but it doesn't help anything to repeat their incorrect analysis.

I agree that the new extruders suck, though. I like the idea that the extruder is an easy swap, but it's absurd that you can't open one up to clear a jam, so you have to swap the extruder for what should be routine maintenance.

As for the prices, well, it's far too high if you're happy with a cheap DIY-style printer, but there are many printers in the same price range as MBI (Ultimaker, for example) so I think that's probably a reasonable price if you want a professionally made printer with a real company behind it, with support, documentation, real R&D, etc. - remember, the price of the product has to support all of that for the company to be sustainable.

For structural purposes, these materials all give you a PLA print. The fact that it's got particles of something else mixed in just makes it a bit weaker because the print is full of "holes". So if you care about the structural properties, these filaments won't help you - look at Taulman filaments, etc., that have different base materials with different material properties.

In terms of appearance, or other properties, the particles matter. For example, if you print with BronzeFill, then sand it down a bit to wear away the outer PLA, you reveal the bronze particles, and the result is quite striking. Or if you print with iron or stainless steel particles, you get a part that magnets stick to. And wood particles change color depending on the print temp, so you can give prints a "wood grain" appearance, and of course they feel like wood, which is very nice.