Price Reduction

From: Elaine Hunt (ehunt@ces.clemson.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 05 2002 - 20:21:52 EET


At 09:38 AM 3/5/2002 -0700, Charles Overy wrote:
>exciting for the industry as it will drive a lot of innovation both in
>software and hardware. I would image that we will see prices come down on
>a lot of different products as the user base increases. Hopefully more ASP

I think the industry will see some changes soon for good or bad. 3D will
obviously try and make their SLAs a one material system while the older
user base will float to 3rd party suppliers when that happens. That means
someone will have to support more than materials so the 3rd party
maintenance people will flourish. A SLA 250 might bring top dollar in
another 2 years. As vendors try to sell single material systems and these
systems age more 3rd party material suppliers will emerge. I can see a PC
type market as the disruptive force even for this industry. All it will
take is one group deciding to build a modular system that can be calibrated
like a machine tool and can produce models for niche markets.

Since RP material is not like ink the one material idea will most likely
hurt the industry since no one supplier can really do it all. I guess the
main idea is to make as much money now before a disruptive technology
knocks you from the lineup. HP, Epson, and others do not make money on
selling ink.Their money is made on selling us a container to hold the ink
and that container only fits their machine. Of course their technology is
high quality and priced to sell. This priced to sell means I do not have
to have quotes, get approval, nor call for installation.........
Considering all that then the ink cartridge is a bargain. Pop and play. I
can go from draft print of emails to photo quality pictures of grand kids
on my office wall and do it fast, cheap, and reliable.

That's where desktop 3d printing has to move. My under $2k machine with
Pop&Play material cartridges.

Elaine

For more information about the rp-ml, see http://rapid.lpt.fi/rp-ml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Tue Jan 21 2003 - 20:13:31 EET