Today I’m excited to share that Shapeways is an early customer of the 3D printer HP announced today!
Shapeways is a part of HP’s Open Customer Engagement Program, which means we are working closely with HP, giving them feedback on features, quality, reliability and operational functionality of its new 3D printing technology. We expect to begin piloting the new printers next year, with commercial availability defined by HP’s roll-out plan. During the pilot period we will work with you, our community, to collect feedback to make the machine even better.
The new 3D printers from HP are not available yet, but we have seen the specs and the products it can produce. From what we have seen and know, it promises to be a real game changer. The new technology is up to 10x faster than any 3D printer currently on the market, can produce incredibly detailed products, will be able to print in full color (CMYK), and it is capable of printing more accurate and functional parts, even potentially with electrical parts in the future.
The speed improvement by itself is enough to be happy about, since it will enable us to really start turning around your orders much faster. Using existing technology we typically are printing 20-40 hours per tray. With this new technology, the print time could be as low as 4-5 hours per tray.
The much higher speed also means that the cost of printing will be reduced. As you can read in my posts about Strong and Flexible plastic, the time the machine spends printing is a substantial amount of the cost of a part. As this machine is much faster than existing technology, that part of the cost will be less. The higher speed and the initial prices of the machines we’ve seen lead us to believe that we could bring prices down substantially.
In addition to the above, the HP 3D printer will be able to produce true four-channel full color plastic going forward. This is what everyone has been asking for! Not brittle parts, no super glue needed. Real full color plastic with the strength you’d want, so you can create even more useful, full color products.
It’s really awesome that HP has asked Shapeways to be an early customer for this new 3D printer as it reflects on you, our community, for being incredibly innovative. We have built a platform enabling designers to bring amazing products to life, and as a result, HP decided our community should be among the very first to get access to the technology. They realized that in working with us, they can learn how they should further improve their machines. The new HP 3D printer has a lot of promise, so we can’t wait to get our hands on the machine so we can start testing it and give you full access to it.
Today marks a really big moment for 3D printing. A very big global technology company is entering the 3D printing market with quite an amazing machine and technology. Surely this will trigger a response from the existing 3D printing companies to accelerate their development of their technology, which in the end benefits you! Can’t wait to see what the future will bring.
Pete / CEO Shapeways
This is very exciting! Looking forward to this implementation!
Woo hoo I can’t wait to open this up to our community to play with next year! HURRAY!
Oh! I didn’t know you made a blog post about this! HAHA! 😀 I thought I was announcing it first in my Cool stuff thread, since the video I saw on YouTube was only three hours old!
Yeah! This is going to be great! This is definitely going to cause Shapeways to flourish with so many unimaginable things of the future! Just in having that full color in a strong plastic alone! Not to mention what other things these printers will be able to do.
I can hardly wait to build something wonderful! 😀
Haha James you can claim first 😉 though I think everyone in the 3D printing industry was watching at the same time! What would you make?
Hi Nat! 😀
Ummmm…. Hmmmmm… I would really like to get into more mechanical things than doing the art stuff all the time. Or maybe combine the two in some cool way. This technology sounds like it will be able to do full color as well high precision with a plastic that is more robust than anything we’ve seen. Just think of all the cool toys and games and action figures and and and. TO MUCH FUN! 😀
I wonder if HP will develop software for it that will allow Shapeways to enable the use of multimaterials for us designers? Now that would be amazing too!
Shapeways is already offering full color, strong plastic, to pilot designers, and it is on a 3d systems machine. That’s not new. You can request to be included in their pilot designer program.
Well no, it is not full color as full black is needed along with CMY (Cyan Magenta Yellow) for full color and that is not a function of the machine. 🙂
Yeah, I tried it out. The colors were faded horribly and my sculpture was deformed very badly. The plastic was viscoelastic, meaning it would deform under its own weight over days time, this was in addition to the bad deformation it had when delivered from Shapeways.
I ended up telling Shapeways that I wanted my money back as it was a misprint and they did reluctantly give my money back. Reluctantly because the customer service representative explained that it was not a misprint because the material was in the pilot program and Shapeways could not afford to give everyones money back if they were not satisfied. I then told the representative that Shapeways shouldn’t be using the funds of customers to do research and development when Shapeways is already making millions in profits.
Furthermore, after a few weeks later it solidified into a non-deforming solid, but became very brittle and dropping it on a hardwood floor from about waist high caused it to shatter.
Interestingly, based on my comments in the forum about it a person contacted me by personal message claiming to be a 3D Systems sales representative and stated that they thought that 3D Systems over sold the capabilities of the printer. When I commented about my 3D Systems Cubex Trio 3D printer and how that was over sold as well as I had numerous problems with it and asked some questions about it, there was no reply. I got the impression that they didn’t want to have a can of worms discussion about my printer. So, it probably was a 3D Systems sales representative since the Cubex is a 3D Systems product that has a LARGE number of customer complaints.
I love HP! I’ve been successfully using their products for decades! All my laptops are HP and I currently have at least one of their printers along with a Canon printer, which is another great company by the way. HP makes very good products and also has very good customer service. Hopefully, this great tradition will carry over with there endeavors into 3D printing.
I am happy to pay for models through the pilot designer program and I am grateful they offer this. Even if my models dont come out to my liking. If you do not want to pay, maybe the pilot designer program is not for you. After all, r&d was the whole point of it, and they didn’t keep that a secret.
Also, I am not confident the HP printer solves any problems. To me it just looks like hype so far, they’v printed absolutely nothing revolutionary, and if they have they’re not showing it for some reason.
Fantastic! I love the increase in speed and who can complain about better color and price?
Their is a lot of hype on their website and the web, but I can only find images of one single thing printed on their revolutionary new machine, the architectural model above, which demonstrates no new technology. It would be nice to see some pics… I would think theyve had time to try out their own machine right?