I run a small company that specializes in digital fabrication technologies like 3D printing. We’ve been in business for about 3 years now with moderate success. During that time, the progress I’ve witnessed in 3D printing technologies has been extremely disappointing. Meanwhile, our studio’s laser cutters do 10x the business of our 3D printers.<p>When desktop 3D printing was hitting the mainstream media in a big way a couple of years ago, the message was about how the technology was revolutionary and you could construct anything you could imagine at the press of the button. The public ate this message up, while industry insiders knew it couldn’t be further from the truth - of course that didn’t stop them from riding the frothy crest of the hype wave, further fueling the public’s misconceptions about the technology.<p>In the intervening 2 or 3 years, consumer desktop 3D printing technology hasn’t improved in any meaningful way. Most desktop FDM printers (the kind you’ve mostly likely seen that extrude a thin bead of melted plastic), are no better than the early Makerbot Replicator launched in 2012. They’re still slow, fairly user hostile (require a great deal of maintenance&#x2F;calibration  to get consistent results) and have many limitations regarding the types of geometries they are able to print due to limitations in support material.<p>The machines available at the consumer scale just aren’t capable of making truly useful parts. This is why there is a glut of green Yoda heads, and machines collecting dust on the back shelves of trendy digital agencies. This isn’t to discredit the minority of scrappy makers who are willing to work within the limitations of the equipment for novel projects - but for the larger public there just isn’t a ‘killer app’ for this type of device, beyond plastic trinkets.<p>The industrial&#x2F;commercial scale printers are certainly much more capable. But like other types of manufacturing equipment, the development of these technologies is slow, mired by patents and driven by stakeholders who have no interest in cannibalizing sales of their expensive product lines by offering affordable consumer versions at a fraction of the price.<p>There are amazing things happening at the frontiers of digital fabrication. Laser cutting and CNC machining technologies are becoming much more affordable and easier to use for a wide variety of designers and engineers. For most applications these types of machines are infinitely more useful than 3D printers. They are providing an avenue for prototyping, short run production and the mass-customization of products to segments of designers and entrepreneurs who could never have afforded them previously. It’s almost a shame that the crappy desktop 3D printer has become the poster child for a much more varied and robust ecosystem of digital manufacturing technology.