Quote Originally Posted by LambdaFF View Post
From a young father point of view : SLS/SLA are not something home-friendly. The waste products and solvents are just too hazardous at the moment and will need robust integrated processes to be widely adopted. This will mean development, cost and most probably closed material packaging / software / ... Automatization on such scale means it will probably no longer be desktop.

The history of technological paths shows that end quality is not always the most deciding parameter for wide adoption.

My guess is that both will evolve in parallel and just as we have ink printers and laser printers, we'll have FDM and SLA offering 2 different options.
Regarding your first point, the moment a toddler gets a mouthfull of uncured resin from a hollow printed toy that cracked, SLA goes out of the window for home use. Even FDM printers run or are going to run into health safety issues, ABS releases fumes that you don't want to have as part of your home atmosphere, and all filaments, AFAIK, release fine dust that can cause problems; personally, if I seat next to my printer for too long I get a cought just from that, I got a really bad cought when I first started with 3D printing, from having my head right into the thing calibrating it for hours on end.

If I remember correctly MakerBot doesn't list ABS as a printing filament for their printers because doing so would make them liable in case of any health condition caused by using it as a printing material.

Yes a printer can have air filtering, a SLA printer could concievable have self cleaning of the parts and inaccesible resin "tub", etc, etc... then you end up with a machine that needs to be plugged to an outside vent, or have replaceable air filters, solvents for cleaning, and the resin/filament that need to be replaced by the user which leads to a machine that has to be absolutely idiot proof or the manufacturer will be bombarded with lawsuits when someone gets hurt.
It's a very tall order to achieve that in a machine that would also be affordable to the masses; not that it couldn't be done, somehow, someday, but I would caution against too much hype about 3D printing, lest it goes through its own "Dot Com Bubble".

I don't want to come out looking as a luddite, far from it I think 3D printing if phenomenal and has great potential, but as I said, let's not get carried away.