Race to the Bottom vs Feature Laden

[curious aardvark]

personally I think that anything much over the $1500 mark (about £800) is not a consumer machine but more of an entry level industry price point.
You can pick up a makerbot replicator dual clone for under £400 and no end of kits and other machines for around that price.
And I've yet to see any fff machine clearly print sharper than my flashforge creator. As good - sure, and there are some cool gimmicks out there on some of the more expensive machines, but price per print - nothing comes close.

Yeah you're always going to get the 'iphone crowd' who are prepared to spend stupid amounts of money on the latest shiny gadget. When we all know that an android phone from china will out perform an iphone with one battery tied behind it's keyboard for a 1/3rd the price.

But in order to make money you need a constant stream of revenue. And the only place you'll get this is in the home market. For every business that thinks it might like to try rapid prototyping, there are a 100,000 households that don't have a 3d printer or even know how much they really want one.

I just don't see a huge future in the mid range fff desktop printer market, until the prices drop.

Sure you've got machines like the hyrel - that are amazing value for money and are versatile enough to pretty much always find a market.
But they are few and far between.

The future is in the sub $500 market. But they do genuinely need to be idiot proof. I'm not getting at anyone - hell I've asked some pretty obvious questions myself - but if even intelligent people are getting stuck right at the start of the 3d printing process, what chance does the average person have ?
They just expect things to work.

There is a limited market for the mid range machines. Unless they can clearly distuinguish themselves from the pack - I just don't see how you can grow the market significantly to cater to them all.
To put this into perspective there are people who will pay thousands of pounds for stereo equipment with solid gold cables.
But 99% of the amrket are comtent with a £50 mini- system that just makes decent noise.
Same thing with the more expensive 3d printers. Yes there will always be a few people who want the latest and shiniest. But the vast majority just want something that works quite well.

At the moment most of the companies producing mid range machines are small startups. So small sales numbers are fine.
The best analogy to the current state of 3d printing is the early automobile industry.
In the early days almost every town had 2 or three men in overalls in garages making and selling cars. Today we're down to a dozen or so global players. And a few small companies making ridiculously expensive custom supercars.
At the moment the 3d printer industry has a lot of men in sheds and a couple of larger corporations.

The first company that produces a reliable sub $500 machine that requires the user to load a filament cartridge, select an object from a catalogue and press print - and NOTHING ELSE ! Will become the Ford of the 3d printer world - god help us all :-)