More interesting to me is how many people build their own 3D printers, but nobody ever builds their own 2D printer. (Though I guess pen plotters are similar mechanically to 3D printers and serve to produce 2D documents, and people do build those, so maybe that's the state of the art. Can't complain too much about true vector graphics!)
> More interesting to me is how many people build their own 3D printers, but nobody ever builds their own 2D printer.
The cheapest commercial 3D printers sell for hundreds of dolars, while you can buy a cheap printer with wifi and bluetooth and a scanner and mobile phone app to boot for about 50 dollars brand new. Used ones can't even be given away for free.
Furthermore, you can print whatever you want in printer stores for a few cents a page.
Also, 3D printers are much more forgiving regarding low resolution output.
Actually, the cheapest consumer 3d printers are now like $100. They pretty crappy, but so are a lot of the low-end printers. (My mom actually just went through that and had to return a 2d printer that was hot garbage.)
The cheapest business 3d printer are about $1000 pre-built ($750 as a kit), and I think 2d printers of the same quality are about half that. So things are coming down nicely. There's still innovation going on in the 3d printer industry, too, so I expect them to keep getting better and more reliable and cheaper.
People do build their own 2D printers. Why? Because you can guarantee there will be no watermarking or identifying information printed into documents, which is very important if you are planning to do illegal things or some kind of counterfeiting. This is also why you never hear about it.
