Will 3D Printers evolve like Personal Computers did?

[MartinPoets]

Do you guys think that we will see a similar evolution of 3D Printers, as we saw with Personal computers? By this I mean, price & size evolution.

For example, in the 60's, a PC took up almost an entire room, and cost over $100,000.

Currently most of the really good 3D Printers are huge, and cost between $10K and $350K. Do you think that within the next decade we will see the size of these printers decrease, while the price also decreases a bunch? Do you think this process will take just as long as it took the PC industry to evolve, or will it happen sooner?

[Geoff]

I really hope not, I don't want to see smaller 3D printers. I want BIGGER!

It's probably more along the lines of the transition from Dot Matrix printers to colour. We can only print in 1, 2 colours now... eventually it will be full colour, much like the matrix vs bubble/inkjet.

[Davo]

The footprint is restricted by the build volume, so I don't think you'll see the same leaps in size reduction that you did with computers.

I hope we'll see standardization and portability - like today, where you can print or display your pdf pretty much anywhere, it would be nice to have that flexibility with your gcode, without having to reslice for a particular environment.

[Larry]

They will evolve, and at a much much faster pace than PCs did. It took PCs about 30 years to fully mature. The difference that a year makes in the 3d printing industry has been huge.