No pricing info?
Huh. It still seems wildly premature at this point. In between cost, difficulty of use, and limited utility at the moment, I don’t see many uses in home construction/repair quite yet. I mean, living in an old house where many elements are non-standard and custom solutions are required, I can think of all sorts of potential uses. But either the cost means that other alternatives are cheaper, the lack of files makes it impossible (there’s just not yet the critical mass of users to provide just the right files you need for a particular purpose), and the limits in size and/or material just don’t allow it (being able to print out custom moulding, or being able to print in plaster, for example, would be amazing).
I read the headline as “Makeouts now on sale at Home Depot.”
The press release doesn’t seem to have much detail, but it points to homedepot.com/makerbot which does.
As far as I can tell, they’re selling a couple models of Makerbot, the scanner, and a variety of different colored reels of filament. They don’t seem to have it set up like a key-making system where you can come in and print your own design on their printer, like having a catalog of all sorts of random little gears and parts you can build there, it’s strictly buying the whole hardware yourself.
And I thought it was amazing enough that Home Depot has a whole section in the tools department that's just frikken' lasers.
I need a 3D Printer because, using the standard mountings, I can’t get my frikken’ lasers to attach to my sharks properly.
That’s a common problem with nonstandard sharks.
Even though I expect sales to be pretty low right now, this is a big step toward making 3D printing something that more folks are more aware of and a brilliant move for Makerbot. At a couple of grand, they’re probably not going to sell all that many at any given store. But having them out there for sale where people can see them and what they can do and get inspired about them is definitely powerful advertising at this point, especially looking toward the future as the tech gets cheaper. They will have registered on people’s mental radar, both that 3D home printing exists and is nifty, and that Makerbot will be the name they mostly associate with it.
It feels kind of like exposing people to the internet, circa 1992. It’s expensive, tricky to use, and of limited utility for most people at this point. I suspect the response will largely be, “I suppose that’s interesting, but that’s clearly not for me.” The tech just isn’t there yet.
Home depot, sell me one that can print various steel alloys, and we’ll be in business!
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