Could not agree more, design is well and support it well - price it to allow all that and future growth. Bingo! you have a business you now don’t hate and a product people will want.
http://www.fabbaloo.com/blog/2014/7/30/dark-days-for-small-3d-printer-manufacturers
The author doesn’t need to mince words. A $100 printer is economically infeasible. The motors and CPU alone would crest that dollar amount and no amount of kick starter fairy dust is going to change that.
@Mike_Miller Peachy Printer. Just sayin’. I believe that they’ll be able to offer a $100 kit with a “bring your own vat” and the sound card/galvanometer bit. They’re behind, and no, they don’t have a viable product yet, but I sincerely believe that they will eventually. Or at the very least, they’ll advance their work enough that if/when they fall through, the work will be released publicly and someone else will be able to pick it up.
But can they idiot-proof it? It’s an Awesome example of outside the box thinking, but the output quality and consumable cost are both nontrivial things to overcome.
An idiot proof $100 3D printer isn’t happening. There is no such thing as an idiot proof 3D printer currently as it stands.
you can’t build anything to be idiot proof, as somebody keeps making stupider idiots. maybe if eugenics hadn’t gotten such a bad reputation then our idiot R&D programs wouldn’t be so well-staffed…
@Joshua_Rowley and I tried to make the E3D-v6 idiot-proof.
We failed.
I’m happy with ceding the Idiot market to Makerbot.
The current 3d printer market is more aptly described as “good enough printers for smart enough people”!
Brook
Those smaller companies tanked not so much because of the market but because the founders did have much business experience in the management realm or couldn’t scale the business among other things. The market is still very strong. Some of the new players weren’t.