The title is unfortunate and misleading. 3D printers are in fact booming. Each year the market doubles in size or more, hardly "falling flat". USD30.000 print

The title is unfortunate and misleading. 3D printers are in fact booming. Each year the market doubles in size or more, hardly "falling flat". USD30.000 printers are falling flat, precisely because you can do lots of the things you only could do in $30.000 machines with $1.000 and companies are not stupid. Imagine someone telling you "computer firms are falling flat" when Apple II appeared, because IBM was loosing market in $1 million mainframes as some people in companies started wondering if those little microcomputer toys maybe could be used just for some things mainframes were used at the time. "The expected household market for printers hasn’t caught on, despite widespread availability of printers at big-box retailers for under $5,000. Less than 10% of Stratasys’s annual sales come from home users, according to an analyst estimate." Why don't they ask Brook from printrbot, Josef Prusa or RichRap?. Of course I won't buy a printer that is not Open Source,a printer I can't improve, has no drivers for my OS, sells me electronic signed filament cartridges at silk price from StrataSys at "for under $5000!!!" when my printrbot simple metal cost me less than $600 and run circles around any cheap stratasys. I have 3 printers in my house: A printrbot, a Prusa Steel and a delta minikossel, and it is just the beginning, resin 3d printers, good resolution 3d scanners, and CNCs are improving enormously, specially on price side.