The MakerBot and Da Vinci printers take rolls of plastic wire and melt them, piece by piece, depositing tiny dots to create objects. The resulting pieces can be light and strong, but their surfaces show a characteristic banded texture and the resolution is limited; the overall impression is crude. The light-curing models used by jewelers and engineers produce smooth objects with fine detail, but they've been out of reach of consumers and tinkerers until now.
The show provided hope on that front, however: XFab, an Italian company that's made professional 3-D printers for a decade, demonstrated a $5,000 laser-powered model at the show, and said it is looking at launching a smaller, $2,500 model later this year. That's roughly the price of the standard MakerBot, which has been the vanguard of the consumer 3-D printing movement so far.
Elsewhere at the show, there was a "technology fashion" show that featured 3-D-printed shoes and a bag with appliques created on a consumer-level, computer-controlled cloth cutter, the Brother ScanNCut.
"The question in my mind is not 'Will we have a 3-D printer in each home?' but 'Which room will it be in?'" said Avi Reichental, the CEO of 3D Systems. "Will it be in your garage? Will it be in your kids' room, or the man cave ... Or the wardrobe?"
