3DPrint.com Team Was Busy During RAPID 2016 Week in Orlando

Writer Clare and editor-in-chief Sarah had a very busy week at RAPID 2016 in Orlando, and we've been trying to keep you all abreast of some of the fantastic sights we saw and news we heard. While Clare provided excellent rundowns of daily highlights, Bridget and Scott kept a keen eye out for major press releases of the week's announcements and offerings, and I kept up with some of the individual events and press conferences, what better way to experience some of RAPID than to take a look through our eyes (well, lenses) at what we saw? Read more at 3DPrint.com: https://3dprint.com/135642/rapid-2016-in-photos/
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Hyrel 3D was there, we had a blast showing off our next-generation printer to the public for the first time. We just had a small booth way at the back of the 600 row, so I'm not really surprised that we didn't get a whole lot of press exposure. The enthusiasm for our System printers and the new 16A from the attendees made up for the lack of reporter traffic.

We also got to see a lot of really innovative things from our fellow small companies, I was mostly looking out for print material providers and other companies whose products could have good synergy with ours. I was very impressed by Polymaker's PVB material and their Polysher machine having seen them now in person. Also, nTopology's mesh generation software looks like it'll be big news in the next few months as well.

Our friends at Polar 3D also had a pair of prototype machines that revisited the old Thing-i-matic model of printing on a conveyor belt, but with a rather innovative twist.

The hp machine actually exists !

Yeah, and it's about the size of a small cargo van. None of the teaser pictures of it had a way to show the scale, but that thing is at least 5ft (or 1.5m) tall.

lol the pictures show it's huge, the clean up unit isn't any smaller.

So basically it's just another super large, very very expensive polyjet system.

I kind of don't see the point.

They're late to an already saturated market - unless they're planning on selling it real cheap, which given their 2d printer market model - is possible. I just don't see how they can take any significant part of the big arse colour printer market.

Now a small desktop polyjet, with built in vacumn clean up facility - that would sell.