3D Printing at CES

In my second hour at CES, after spending some time looking at health trackers, I stumbled into the 3D printing area. There seemed to be hundreds of firms showing off their 3D printing skills, and all of the plastic things they printed. I was struck by how many firms are eagerly competing and innovating here.

The first printer I saw, and maybe my favorite, was Zeus: A 3D scan, print, copy, fax machine:

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When pressed, the Zeus guy admitted the fax button just sends a copy of a scan to any other connected Zeus machine over the internet, but still. I was impressed. I asked about resolution, and learned that it’s measured in layer microns, and the highest (smallest) resolution of this machine was 80 microns, but it could print more quickly to other resolutions. Here they made a copy (left) of a Zeus figure (right):

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And here’s an elephant, printed at 200 microns. The picture doesn’t quite do it justice, but it has a number of moving, interlocking parts, all of which were printed in one go, with no need for assembly:

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Another printer we spent some time looking at was the Cube, which offers a range of consumer-focused 3D printers
2015-01-06 12.02.50 Cube 3D printer

While I know 3D printing technology has come a long way in the past few years, going from an interesting idea to an effective way to illegally make guns or to send tools to the international space station, the sense I got from the conference is that this is only the beginning, and quality keeps rising while prices have dropped to the point where you can easily buy a 3D printer for less than $1k. Good stuff.