What does the future bring? @Shauki and I were chatting and the following comment was made:
“10 years from now, printers will be easy to use, full color, and nothing like the toys we’re playing with today.”
So what do you suppose that will be? SLS is a non-starter, too messy. 8 nozzles with 8 spools won’t fly, and mixing in-nozzle would probably create a LOT of wasteage.
I could see something like that, but I’d imagine consumers won’t accept ANY of the FFF ribbing, or the current time requirements for parts of any real size.
Those ‘Wax pucks’ from Xerox are called Solid Ink.
Fun Fact: the Solid Ink engineering team was acquired by 3D Systems at the beginning of this year, bringing our jetting and material science experience to the 3D Printing industry
Addressing the speed issue, I’m thoroughly convinced that the technology that ‘wins’ will be raster (not vector-based, like FDM) and thus conducive to parallelization. Never underestimate the power of massive parallelism.
SLS is messy, so is SLA. Technologies that require gloves, breathing masks or eye protection can’t win either.
color laser printers in the past have had a drum (or ribbon) where the laser picked up each color of toner, then laid that down on the paper, when then fused the toner to the paper…at 22 pages per minute, I wonder how long it’d take to lay down an 8.5x11 image of toner, X inches high?
The laser drum is charged by the laser to attract the toner particles. A heated roller is used to fuse the toner to the paper. I’m not sure how you’d adapt that to multiple layers of toner.
Actually, what I was envisioning (technology aside) was building up the printed item, a layer at a time, from reservoirs of pigment, then laying each layer down and fusing it. It’s not possibly a unique idea, and it would let you parallelize it.
Probably…just at one one-hundredth (one-thousandth) the price…because I’m pretty sure someone like Trek has a significant budget allocated to that printer…
The ProJet line from 3D Systems is very similar, using a print head like that used in Solid Ink printers to jey droplets of resin onto the build platform and cure them a layer at a time.
