I see a widening selection of materials which can be used in filament printers as being the major stepping stone for the home printer. As Brian said in the article, Who wants to print cheap looking plastic things? I'd like to have a selection of metallic filaments on hand to be able to print with.

Another biggy is the low cost, high resolution domestic scanner. Just compare domestic 3D printing to digital photography. The camera and desktop colour printer have taken photography out of the dark room and into the living room. A similar thing would happen if someone produced a scanner that produced high resolution images.

Along with the high resolution scanner is the need for simple to operate software for converting scanner output to printable files. At the moment, the clean-up software seems a bit beyond the scope of non-expert users.

Old Man Emu