If you want to wait a day or more and pay what a one-off item made with expensive material on an expensive machine costs, sure.
3D printing has it’s place. That place is not everywhere for everything.
If you want to wait a day or more and pay what a one-off item made with expensive material on an expensive machine costs, sure.
3D printing has it’s place. That place is not everywhere for everything.
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That will change. Maybe not print times, but the prices will come down and the materials will evolve. Personally, I think even the print time will eventually become shorter.
If you don’t want the floor piece at a furniture store, you do have to wait until your custom color or size arrives at the sales point.
I can see future designs where the frame and perhaps selected areas of a piece of furniture are printed and then fabric pillows are added. However, it is only a matter of time until manmade fibers that are indistinguishable from the woven variety can be used in the 3D process. Spinnerets in place of extrusion nozzles could be one innovation. I believe industry already does this for some fabrics.
Our common upholstered furniture could someday only be available as custom orders from expensive artisan shops. People will laugh at today’s 3D printers, just as we do at the clunky early computers or brick-sized “mobile phones”.
No one ever thought PCs would be affordable for almost everyone or do all the tasks they routinely do today. Home sound production systems and home video editing equipment today offer professional quality for a relatively affordable price.
A real replicator or a universal fab that isn’t dedicated to turning out one simple widget may even become reality in the next 10 years or so. Just look at how inventors keep trying to reproduce the science fiction machines seen in Star Trek.
I believe this is the next industrial revolution.
Maybe. But with competitive economies of scale, I would suspect the costs go down. Just like we’ve seen with digital TVs, et al.