Consumer devices development of tech and cost

[curious aardvark]

probably. But it won't come from companies like carbon.
They're making money by NOT selling printers and Not licensing their technology, but by using the odd video of a clip machine working to hoover up grants and technology endowments.

It's good work if you can get it :-)

At some point in the materials development you're going to get a really rapid setting resin, couple that with a dlp printer setup and you could have extremely rapid printing indeed.

Lasers are cheap and readily available - not sure where you got your info from.

[varis]

Maybe speed is not an issue if 3D printing is your best and only hobby and you dedicate your time to running multiple printers in parallel. But for the part time printer, the requirement to babysit over (large) prints for 7-8 hours in a row, plus the added considerations like suffering the noise for that period in a home environment, bring some practical limitations to your schedule and so on.

Time required has several practical implications both for your printing activities and the rest of your day. If you could get finished models out in just 5 minutes, you could iterate much faster over prototype versions and nail the finished design in a much shorter timespan. Also I take PLA at least can be easily recycled so there is a use for all those yoda heads

That said I think already a half of my time goes to working with the 3D design part and it's easy to multitask while printing.

Lasers are cheap and readily available - not sure where you got your info from.

Like stated it was from the Wikipedia page. Glanced over it quick and they said the availability (and safety!) of powerful lasers is just one of the blockers.