I have been in the Rapid Prototyping/3D printing business for many years. I worked with one of the first commercial SLAs many moons ago.
3D Systems has never made a secret of their business plan, which is to make money primarily on material, not machines. After all you sell material again and again while machines tend to be around for years.
So they sell machines at a break-even price and make it up on the material which only comes in proprietary packages that will only work on their machines. Of course this means paying 3 or so times the going rate per pound for material.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Hill
Wow, that's Hewlett-Packard bad...not cool.
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