Eagerly anticipated by the “Make” crowds is the “low cost” 3D printer from Desktop Factory. The Fabbaloo blog has a recent interview (Part 1, Part 2) with CEO Cathy Lewis. In the interview, she describes the market for 3D printing and the release schedule for the first Desktop Factories:
"Cathy Lewis: In terms of competition we feel that there is ample opportunity in this market for a number of participants.
The current vendors like Stratasys, ZCorp, Objet and 3d Systems are not household names as you see in the 2d printing space.
In fact, few outside the industry have ever heard of them and after almost 20 years they continue to be relatively small companies with revenues ranging from $50M to $150M dollars annually. And most of them, with one exception, are very profitable and growing rapidly.
They tend to sell through distributors and they may be too busy satisfying current customer needs and moving into Rapid Manufacturing to worry about what we are doing. At least for the time being.
However, one can never take their eye off of the prize . . .
Fabbaloo: Final question: When can we get one?
Cathy Lewis: We are planning on placing several local beta units with customers when we complete this round of testing.
Those placements will be in the first quarter of 2009 after which we will begin our commercial launch.
Please keep in mind that we do have 350 units on order at this time and we will prioritize those customers first.
And remember we will update testing, beta and launch on a regular basis via our Desktop Factory newsletter!"
It might be easy with all the market developments to lose sight of the big picture. The Ponoko blog helped out recently with an up to date market overview (“3D Printers summarized”).
The last two days saw England hosting the international Rapid Manufacturing Conference for the third time. Maybe Frank Piller will do a write-up. ;-)
Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.
Very amusing thought, well told, everything just yet laid out on the shelves:)
http://proeto-site.ru
Posted by: Irrelluse | 01/13/2010 at 09:17 AM