Selective Inhibition Sintering - New Addordable Metal Printing Process

Metal 3D printing is a work-in-progress as R&D continues. Current 3D printers that can use metal alloys typically have a starting price of around $500,000, which severely limits their use. Furthermore, their printed products are imprecise and tend to be pretty rough. Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis and his team out of the University of Southern California are researching a totally new, unique method that just might turn lower-cost 3D metal printing into a reality. Their new method, Selective Inhibition Sintering (SIS), is effectively the inverse of selective laser sintering (SLS) and other forms of metal printing, and seems to be a very promising new technique. Read about the technique and what makes it so unique in the full article: http://3dprint.com/24009/selective-i...ion-sintering/ ‎


Is this the path to affordable metal printing from the desktop? Let's hear your thoughts! Below is a photo of the SIS 3D printer:
http://3dprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/sint5.png

SIS is a cheaper method to print with metal, though you still require a sintering kiln, which alone is a bit outside the price range for general consumption. Also, the excess material from an SIS process isn't easily reusable.

That said, the printing portion itself is much faster than SLS, which makes products printed on them more affordable, so that's good.