You know how professional 3D printers start at $10,000 and then work their way up to $100,000 or more? Yeah…that’s probably going to change soon.
Dave Durant posted a long series of examples of how the latest generation of open-source 3D printer software and hardware is quickly outstripping our ability to challenge it. His post is well worth reading through, so I’m just going to highlight one point.
He linked to this post in which Jordan Miller put one of the newest Ultimaker prints under a microscope.
That thing on the left, kind of hard to identify…that’s a finger. Or, rather, those are the little ridges that make a fingerprint. Yeah. The average layer height in that print is 0.074mm (74 microns).
I just want to remind the reader that resolution was achieved on a printer that’s not only around $1600 but also open-source, so the software and hardware designs are available for free.
Dave has another example of a print by Paul Candler that uses 0.02mm (20 microns) layers (two perimeter layers for each infill layer). For comparison, the Stratasys UPrint can do 0.25 or 0.33mm. It costs $20,000.
If you want an Ultimaker (you should by now) you can even win one for free.
