Questions about 3d printing and solidoodle from newbie

To add to what adrian says, today's 3D printers are also quite finicky creatures and require a lot of fixing, adjusting, calibrating, rebuilding, and modifications.  You wouldn't go wrong to compare the state of the industry to that of HAM radio in the early 20th century, when people mostly were building their own radios from kits, or the home computer industry in the 1970s, long before the advent of the TRS-80 or Commodore 64, when people were soldering their own memory boards.  Sure, there are 3D printers that can do commercial-quality stuff with commercial reliability, if you're prepared to invest hundreds of thousand, just like in 1930 you could build an AM radio station, or in 1975 you could buy an IBM mainframe.  Could you run a business on a hobbyist's $800 printer?  Maybe, but you'd have to put in huge amounts of time, start with some great technical expertise, and it would have to be a very small business.  Like maybe an etsy shop.

I'd also advise you to consider what a 3D printed item, made by such a printer, can and can't be.  It can't be anything that depends on a lot of structural strength, because best-case prints are like 30% of the strength of injection-molded plastic.  It can't be anything that depends on very fine detail unless you're prepared to invest another huge amount of time, both in learning how to do good prints, and in the aftercare of your prints (filing, cutting away supports, acetone vapor bathing, etc.).

Finally, you're never going to beat anyone else on price for the things you print if what you're printing is already available from manufacturers.  You can beat on price in three specific areas only.  Customized items; items traditionally made from expensive materials but where plastic would do (e.g., costume jewelry); and items that replace something that isn't sold separately (like replacement parts), whenever the structural strength and detail issues aren't prohibitive.

I think there's a niche in there for small businesses making very customized things of high value but low volume, but it's a small niche and has a high investment to get into.  This isn't a gold rush.

5) Skanect still requires a *lot* of post processing to make prints of what you want... have a read of http://fabbaloo.com/blog/2012/9/6/hands … anect.html for example. Basically - it captures a scene - not a 'model' . It wont just spit out a 3D Printable file.  This is where the 'kiosk' or 'walk in store' concept falls apart - you'd need to scan people, then spend 30-60 minutes cleaning up the file and extracting your model, cleaning that model (another 30 mins), then getting it sliced and printed (anywhere from 2-15 hours...) And if you want reasonably detail in the printed models, you can't really do anything more than .25mm layers.. which means it will definately take a long time to print.  Basically - if we took basic labor rates - you are already looking at something that is going to 'cost' you about $120-300 of your 'time' (i'm assuming you consider yourself above minimum wage ). Means its going to get awfully tight on any margins you could obtain...

For example, heres the image from the blog:

Thats going to take a LOT of work to clean up, and its not 'high detail' still - its probably 5mm resolution at best...
So its not a 'drop in, I'll have it ready by the afternoon' solution by any means.

Heres an actual 'walk-through'.. http://www.threedeemedia.org/KinectMeshlab.html .. thats a lot of work !

6) Not at the same price. You are probably coming at this from the wrong angle. You are essentially asking 'how can I offer a luxury car hire service - but using a Chevy Nova.....' .  Have a look at the quality produced by the likes of Shapeways.com .. They have a product people pay them for, and the printers they use start at $25,000 ... and use Laser Sintering not FDM - hence their models are smooth and not jagged like on any FDM printer usually.

7) most of its available elsewhere.. but again - the bigger issue I see is One printer will produce you one set newlywed busts every day... maybe 2. And thats assuming its busy printing 24 hours a day. To do it at a pace that would be reasonable if you want to charge money for it - you'll need 4 or 5 of them going at once... Or you need to tell people that there is a 5-7 day turn around... at which point they may as well go to Shapeways.com and get a higher quality print in the same period of time.

If you're an engineer - and money is an issue - then I'd probably look to build a few Prusa i3's using friends to print the printable parts and then buy the cheapest and nastiest electronics you can find on aliexpress.com .... but get 4 sets of them 'cause you'll probably need them.

And as for my sentence - umm.. it means pretty much what it means The base-entry-level-SD2 is $499, but it does not have a heated build platform which is more or less considered mandatory for successful repeatable ABS prints (again - speaking commercially - you can't exactly tell someone after 5 days of waiting for their 1 day print that you still can't get it to print without warping and ruining the print). All other models of SD2 are identical to the SD3 except for the Build Size - SD2 is 150x150x150 and SD3 is 200x200x200 (6" vs 8"). There is also an allmetal enclosure available for the SD2 with a clear door.. this enclosure is not available for the larger SD3 so most people build their own... These are the only differences between the printers, and I stated them to be completely accurate instead of just saying 'yeah, their the same besides build area'