3 ms·
It sure feels like 3D printing especially "desktop" has trouble improving recently, and is nowhere near democratized like classic printer, and its not entirely
by qiine 2y ago
It sure feels like 3D printing especially "desktop" has trouble improving recently, and is nowhere near democratized like classic printer, and its not entirely a hardware problem.
- sircastor 2y agoPart of the trouble with 3D printing is that its utility is limited if you don’t know how to design, and not everyone wants to learn. If you have no CAD/modeling experience, making something custom is limited to the simple variation available in the software, or you just buy off the shelf models. 3D printing skeptics said that 3D printers were just for making worthless junk. There’s an opportunity coming with an LLM-style text-to-model generator. I saw one recently and it is pretty exciting.
- xyzzy123 2y agoAgree. For me personally, 3d printing has been a "hit" and the printers keep getting better, cheaper and more reliable. Good bed levelling, multi-head, failure detection etc are reaching the mainstream and the printers I have now are amazingly better than what I started with. But most people (reasonably) don't seem that interested in making small plastic things. It's a niche thing to want to do and as you point out, there's a learning curve. Plus materials and process limitations mean that a printed item will generally be inferior to a bought one unless you designed it yourself to meet your exact use-case.