Ugh. If anyone was convinced that we were beyond the hype bubble, this should be solid proof that we aren’t quite there yet. The more I see stuff like this, the more I know I’m going to run into more people calling every 3D printer they see a makerbot.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/01/27/dell-partners-makerbot-resell-3d-printers-scanners-us-businesses-starting-february-20
Well, overall it’s good news though. Dell has a lot more visibility than any of the 3D printer manufactures do, perhaps more than 3D printing as a whole does.
More visibility will mean more people buying, and more demand for inexpensive, consistent filament without bubbles.
It’ll also put the machines in the hands of novices and others who won’t want to put the time and effort into proper maintenance, which will force innovations in the printers’ robustness.
Granted, it will also lead to cheaper garbage at the low end, but the mid and high ends will benefit;)
I’m of two minds about this. First I would agree with Daniel, but then on the other hand - look at what happened with computing. Early days - experimentation, home kits, loads of start ups, heavy DIY, lots of improving on past designs in an open way. Then a couple companies got in there, started selling massive numbers of units, developed critical mass and systematically crushed any and all competition they could. Innovation all but died, computers became a heavily consumerist realm.
Given all the patents the few big 3D companies have, how much hope is there really for anyone else to ever become part of the cultural dialog? It’s especially bad when other large companies like Dell partner with MB, because it just shows that the club is already here and has very few members.
As for robustness, when was the last time you tried to have your inkjet printer serviced? Why would 3D printers be any different? Consumer garbage…
Inkjets are pretty much all considered low end 
Laserjets, which fill the mid and high end are much more robust 
Corporate greed over what the user really need again.
@Nigel_Dickinson That would be corporate stupidity, not greed. Think Microsoft. For corporate greed, you would first have to dominate an industry to the point of forcing your product on the consumer. Dell I think is trying anything at this point to try n save itself from nonresistance. So this would be corporate Need…
With all the big names in do you guys think Reprap will continue to gain adoption?
I mean what if the low end were improved to where it can match the quality and speed of entry open source machines. Would it still worth the time investment.
We’re looking into opensource for better profit margin. But I’m not so sure now.
Any opinion to the contrary?
I think if the open source community can get together and make themselves as visible as the corporates, BEFORE the corporates get a strong foothold, it could be a revolution in this commercialist era. The problem though lies in patents… a corporation can swoop in and patent something that already exists if someone else hasn’t patented it yet, taking credit and forcing the originator to lose it permanently.
@Daniel_ShadowDrakken That’s actually much harder than you might think, and is one of the reasons a open internet is so important. For instance, once a program or idea is released on the internet, it becomes impossible for anyone (who didn’t release it) to then prove it was their original idea. And the person who’s idea it was, gave up all rights to it one they released it. It’s the old story of the wheel, which of course no one has ever patented. What they can do though, is make it highly profitable for those with original ideas to patent them as apposed to just releasing it as open source. This has good and bad points. But so long as it’s a free market, everything will work itself out…
Getting help at the component level, hot ends and the like, so that corporations can’t undercut the costs of homebrews would be ideal… and unfortunately will likely never happen.
There would need to be dozens of homebrews, working together with group buying power, producing kits for sale at great prices and that have been really honed in and easy to use with minimal calibration work to allow them to act as an entity at a corporate power level…
ah well, one can dream, right?
@Daniel_ShadowDrakken Exactly what we try to do here in Orange County, CA. Unfortunately, right now there are only a couple of us with spare time and technical skills so progress is pretty slow.
Again, brand/marketing means visibility, means sales, means more money for R&D. As long as we keep having 300 Reprap Derivatives being sold by 2 man companies, people will think a 3dPrinter is a Makerbot or a Cube
Cube… ugh, any of them with proprietary cartridges shouldn’t even be considered in my book. The cartridge doesn’t do anything except lock you into their supplies (albeit that means more consistent quality). It’s not like ink cartridges that the print head built in can affect quality.
@Nathan_Ryan when was the last time you needed to have your inkjet serviced? Serviceability and reliability are two very different things.
As far as innovation dying once there were big brands involved in home computers (Commodore PET, Apple II, CP/M, BBC Micro sort of era, presumably)… Well, I’m not sure what universe you’re living in, but it doesn’t appear to be the same one as mine.
There were always minority brands and hobbyists right alongside the mainstream, and they weren’t even a much smaller market than when they were the whole market — it’s just that they went underground.
Re: the wheel: you do realise patents have a limited life, right? Sans patent system, we’d have probably seen the inventor if FDM developing it in-house either to failure which nobody knew about or to a 3D printing service which kept the actual techniques secret. They wouldn’t be able to sell 3D printers as such because people would clone them. FDM is actually one of the few examples in the tech world of patents working exactly as they should: when the patent expired a few years ago in '09 is when we got an explosion of DIY creativity.
@Jasper_Janssen I’d argue that’s exactly the opposite of how patents are supposed to work. We would have had hobby machines in the 90s and they would already be much more ubiquitous than they are now. Techniques would have been also developed for the computers at the time, which likely means way more efficient slicing methods and optimizations being produced. By now that software would have been nearly instant at producing gcode.
Those patents stifled the industry by 20 years. Patents are meant to encourage innovation, and in this case they obviously failed.
Thing is, without patents, we wouldn’t have those hobby machines, because either he’d never have developed the FDM technique, or he’d have kept it completely in-house specifically so nobody could figure out how it worked.
This actually happened to a fair few machines developed in the early industrial age.
@Jasper_Janssen that’s just simply not true. For example the first radio transmission. There wasn’t just 1 inventor. There were like 10. One guy did it first, while a bunch of other people were already working on it. Having an idea, doesn’t mean that you’re the ONLY person who will come to a conclusion with that idea or develop it further. Patents simply exist to lock out competition, and keep others from using it. Patents here failed…big time.
FDM printing is such a simple idea that anyone who simply saw a finished print would know exactly, right then and there, how it worked. Keep the technique secret all you want, it wouldn’t have stopped others from developing it.
Many many industries have been stifled by patent bullshit, this is the perfect example of patents doing exactly that.