I work for a small mechanical engineering firm with an HP Designjet. It may be of interest because our experience seems somewhat different to the home users pos

I work for a small mechanical engineering firm with an HP Designjet. It may be of interest because our experience seems somewhat different to the home users posting here, in that: 1. It has 'just worked' for over a year without maintenance and with little downtime. Note that the name and styling of the machine seem meant to be reminiscent of inkjet printers, which for all their faults tend to be 'plug and play': the 3D printer has lived up to that. We have used consumables as directed in the manuals, disposing of the print beds after each use. 2. 3D CAD software (Autodesk Inventor) is already in use and there are plenty of people very comfortable using it, so the design is a breeze. I'm curious how people are managing since CAD is expensive and there aren't many open-source options. Once the parts are designed they are exported as STEP files, brought into HP's print layout software and the print bed arrangement is set out manually by dragging-and-dropping. The printer has mainly been used for promotional goods and, after an initial flush of enthusiasm, not much for general prototyping. My prediction that an actual product would be sent out within the year with 3D-printed parts in it proved false. There were some cool attempts to 3D-print moulds for dispensing plastics into, which is vastly quicker than using the services of a toolmaker, but sadly the surface finish was unacceptably poor due to the printing being in layers. To summarise, the low-end professional market seems to be fulfilling the promise that 3D printing can be accessible (to companies where it isn't their core expertise), but it doesn't seem to be causing a revolution yet.