Is 3D Printing Being Underestimated?

Am I the only one here who thinks that although there is a ton of talk about 3D Printing being the future, and such a growth industry, that many people, investors, and techies are still underestimating how fast things will take off over the next 3-4 years?

Gartner put a report out comparing 2012 to 2017, saying, "The 3D printer market will grow from $288 million in 2012 to more than $5.7 billion by 2017"

Sure that is staggering growth, but I still think it's underestimated. Every day it seems like we hear news from one or 2 major companies who say they are adopting 3D Printing in some way or another. It also seems like every few weeks another big 3D Printing company pops up out of the woodwork. $5.7 billion is a lot of money, but when you are talking about the economy of the entire world relying on a technology like they will be with 3D printers in the coming few years, that's nothing. There are so many different facets to the 3D printing market. I would not be surprised if it were a $15-$20 billion industry by 2017. I think 2014 alone will see revenues of well over $1 billion in the industry. One major discovering like the ability to 3D print a Human liver could easily be worth $5 billion+ annually alone.

Am I just too optimistic?

It really could go either way. Manufacturing will drive the growth in the next 1-2 years, but consumer based printing could really kick in in the 3-6 year time period. If print speeds can come up significantly, and metal printers can be purchased under $500, we would see explosive consumer growth in my opinion.

I think 3dprinting is being underestimated. I am sure in the next few years it will explode. This is the most exciting technology to happen since the iphone!

I'm totally stoked about 3D printing! I have built 3 printers now and enjoy the heck out of it. However, I tend to think that consumer printing needs are being overestimated. I think we will continue see an increase in consumer growth over the next couple years but then reality will hit. These things are not ready to be on most of my friend's desks yet. Folks will pay several thousand dollars for the most popular printers, get them home where they will turn into a cool looking paperweight.

Until we really see some growth the technology of consumer printing it is destined to fail. By growth I mean new stuff that will make printers easier to maintain and keep calibrated! Automatic bed leveling is a recent development that may make things easier but I haven't seen it adopted by any but the reprap crowd yet. The printers showcased at CES were all the same stuff that we can get everywhere else. Think about it, the only changes are the color and shape of the outer cases. Makerbot, the "darling" of the consumer printing world, showed off three "new" printers that use the exact same mechanics we've seen since they started. Correct me if I'm wrong. If the industry continues to sell these to the non-maker crowd then we will eventually see a backlash. They are not easy to use and "ready out of the box" is really not completely true. Wait until their extruder starts to strip and they are told to get out a hex driver and take the thing apart. There is a lot of hype out there right now that I don't think the consumer side of the industry can completely live up to.

So, for myself, I still love 3D printing but I'm a bit of a sceptic about the mainstream excitement going on.

3D printing will have massive and as yet unknown and unexpected benefits and impacts. Big Pharma will not like commodity 3D printers making prosthetics and the like as we are seeing already in so-called third world nations. They'll want to get their hands around that kind of disruption to their business, but will they be able to? I think the genie is out of the bottle on that score.

I don't think that any analyst, business or even the general populations of the world yet know or can predict what the democratisation of manufacturing will do to all manner of industries. But one thing is for certain, any industry that ignores this phenomenon will not exist in a few decades!

" Big Pharma will not like commodity 3D printers making prosthetics and the like as we are seeing already in so-called third world nations. They'll want to get their hands around that kind of disruption to their business, but will they be able to? I think the genie is out of the bottle on that score."

I don't see "Big Pharma" caring one way or the other about people designing and printing custom prosthetics. This isn't the sort of thing that's massively profitable for them; that requires a product that can be manufactured in bulk at low cost but sold at a big mark-up to customers in search of cures or (even better from a profitability standpoint) palliatives for chronic conditions. Making custom prosthetics is more of a cottage industry, with lots of small shops putting in a lot of work to individually tailor replacement parts for particular people. A 3D scanning to 3D printing workflow will certainly make this easier to do, but it's not the kind of low-hanging fruit that attracts Big Pharma.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

I think 3D printing will take it's biggest role within the design industry as a Rapid Prototyping tool.
Having said this this technology is still waiting to "peak" in the Domestic environment due to the software's not being fully user friendly to most people.

I believe Reprap has been around for nearly 10 years now and it seems like it has made very little progress which I find intriguing.
Maybe is it due to the lack of investment?
Putting your money in the industry seems like a rather safe bet to me.

I don't really think it's being underestimated. It's probably just about where it should be. A lot of people are saying that 3D Printing will be just as big as the Internet was. This could be true, but I don't think you can say that is an underestimation :)

In my opinion, what we need most for the consumer sector of the market to really launch into the stratosphere is to have metal printers available to the general public at about a $$300-500 price point. If that can happen and the metal powders are cheap enough as well, things will really take off, and innovation will really erupt with all kinds of awesome creations. Think we may be about 2-3 years away from that point. 2-3 years seems like an eternity in the tech industry though.

Interestingly the share prices of many of the main 3dprint companies took a beating this week. Could this be because of the lack of a major breakthrough printer that would attract the average household consumer? Will 3dprinting have an 'apple' moment?

Even if metal printers do get that cheap (and the powders too - right now atomized metal is brutally expensive), it's hard to see the average consumer having much use for one. What would really be worth printing out at home -even in metal - that would be cheaper and easier than ordering it over the net? Most people throw things out when they need spare parts; they don't even try to fix them. And when they do, they usually find out that it makes more sense to buy a new one, with the assurance that it will work, than to try and make their own repairs and then have it fail to fix the problem. Small appliances and electronic gizmos aren't even designed to be repaired any more, even if parts were available. I suppose there could be some kind of Maker Revolution that would turn all this around, with a new appreciation of fix-it skills and fabrication expertise leading to implementation of a new generation of products that were easy to diagnose and repair, but I'm not holding my breath...

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com