Re: Price Reduction

From: Steven Pollack (StevenP@DigitalJeweler.NET)
Date: Tue Mar 05 2002 - 21:14:53 EET


Elaine,

Why is 3D Systems moving to a one material system and in what way does this affect the owners of their machines ability to use other materials?

Steven Pollack
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Elaine Hunt
  To: rp-ml@rapid.lpt.fi
  Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2002 12:21 PM
  Subject: Price Reduction

  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