Quote Originally Posted by curious aardvark View Post
what he said - which is exactly what I said :-)

The staple gun scanners get reviews from 'bloody awful' all the way up to 'almost works'
Like i said, at the moment you can't get a decent scanner for under about $600 and they're still very much in the beta phase as far as software goes.

Print resolution for makerbot clones varies between 0.1mm down to 0.05mm - depending on the frame mostly.
My wooden framed creator x will do 0.1mm while my solid metal framed klic-n-print will go down to 0,05.
Not that I will EVER print anything that takes that long.

Also bear in mind that resolution is not just down to the horizontal layers. It's also down to the bead diameter as well. On most machines this is between 0.4 - 0.5 mm from 0.4mm nozzle.
This is the main limit to fine detail.

Forget the scanner for now and start saving up for an sla machine.
Check out brumbaers prints. Small figures awesome detail:

Yeah, I figured a scanner was likely to be something to get down the road, but also figured it would be worth asking about now since I was already asking about printers anyway.