Science & Technology

You May Get Your Own 3D Printer Sooner Than You Think

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3d printers are hitting the consumer market and they're not cheap. But then, neither were PCs when they first hit the consumer market. Quartz notes that companies are innovating ways to get the prices down fast:

Meet the Replicator 2. She's top of the line, for home 3D printers, and she'll cost you $2,200, not including shipping.

That's about what a good PC cost in the 1980s. And the parallels between the personal computing revolution and the one in 3D printing are irresistible (they've been made countless times in all the usual places). Ok, so these things don't do much more than print out easily-breakable, rough-hewn plastic tchotchkes, but watch out! Someday we'll use them to solve the really big problems.

Now meet the Pirate3D printer, care of a startup in Singapore. It claims that once it launches, it will be the "world's cheapest" 3D printer, at around $350 apiece.

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