Maybe many of the people that shop at Stsples are not aware this technology even exists.
In my experience, at least in my locale, the shoppers ask for help finding a USB cable over an HDMI cable. If they are in Staples paying 10x the rate on a cable instead of at monoprice, this just might be something of a value add on.
What many don't know is that a few Staples offer a significant print shop on site. Yes, you can order 1000 rounded corner 4/4 business cards online for near free, or you can pay $90.00 at Staples. Some just haven't yet learned how to enter words into google yet. It's surprising actually. So surprising that LMGTFY is a huge whoosh!
You don't have to drive to Staples. Apparently, they will deliver, much like their existing print services.
They are using a 3D printer that uses glued paper, rather than plastic. I don't know if Shapeway offers that. It'll be interesting to see what the pricing is, and what you can do with layered paper vs. plastic.
The important thing isn't whether you can get stuff 3D printed at Staples. The important thing is that we're nearing an inflection point for 3D printing the way mobile was when the iphone came out in 2007. Meaning, if you missed the elevator ride up with the smart phone, there's another ride coming around the corner.
Is there a technology that is as versatile and cost effective for small scale batches, but slower to finalize the product? The promise of 3D printing is appealing to me because it means I can start making things out of materials that I have thought to be previously out of my budget's reach.
Time is less of a concern from my point of view. If someone can create my one-off plastic model using, say, injection moulding for tens of dollars but it takes a month to get back to me, I'm cool with that. Does such a thing even exist though?
Though your fisrt link says it starts at $1495, compared to the $2 that some 3D printing services start at. You can build some pretty impressive things for under $100 with 3D tech. I'm not sure it is the same league. The second link might be a little closer though.
They two links are for the same company.
The first link is for an injection MOLD. The mold can produce a few thousand parts at ~$1-$3/each.
For 1,000-10,000 parts, ProtoMold is an great option.
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear in the original post. I'm interested in one-off pieces that I can design to solve problems around the house and if it takes a month to wait for that, no big deal. I don't need thousands of pieces.
The parent to my original post suggested there was something akin to 3D printing out there in terms of cost and versatility that was just slower to produce. Something designed for mass production certainly isn't it.
I'm interested in one-off pieces that I can design to solve problems around the house and if it takes a month to wait for that, no big deal
This does not seem like a big market, though. Exlcuding perhaps interior decoration. The engineering properties of 3d printed items for DIY are still TBD (lots of plastic cracking complaints, glued paper doesn't seem much better in terms of field-use). Also, in practice waiting 30 days for a DIY prototype is unlikely to be acceptable (serial project workflows & all that). small batch CNC will get you access to metal. Access to ABS does not seem all that special. Is there something in mind you have (like a project?) or is this all just theoretical?
Like I said, I was just interested to know what other technologies are directly competing with 3D for one-off builds that can produce the same result (in terms of cost, function, etc.), but have the downside of being slower to produce as suggested by the poster before me.
The slower/faster thing is really more an issue about iteration and time to market for projects. Project costs are a function of overhead--in addition to piece-cost. Overhead is a function of speed and thus project cost is a function of speed. This cost is/can be an order of magnitude larger than the unit-piece-cost. In other words, if you relax the speed constraint you implicitly relax the cost constraint, at least in a normal context. But these tradeoffs (and choices) depend on understanding a project's scope/spec. You are high-light at least one edge case, though: the home DIY, where time is no value but unit cost is paramount. In this case 3D printing might be a good idea, provided your project is suited to such an ouput.
