Virginia Postrel looks at the current state of adoption for 3D printing:
Contrary to what the names suggest, a desktop 3-D printer today isn’t analogous to a 2-D desktop printer in the 1980s. When computer printers spread, after all, they didn’t replace printing plants. They replaced typewriters. As costs dropped and graphics software became easy to use, people found all sorts of new uses for desktop printing. But the technology originally caught on by offering a better way to do something familiar.
Instead of thinking of 3-D printers as printers, it makes more sense to think of them as cameras: a way for non-artists to create images. Before it went digital, photography too required a whole ecosystem, with cameras, film, developing and so on. George Eastman created a vast amateur market by making the part of photography people cared about — capturing pictures — easy, while hiding the technically demanding steps. Kodak handled the film and development, proclaiming, “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest.”
The critical insight is that the image is what’s exciting, not the machine that generates it.
“What 3-D printers are really producing, is demand for design. These machines, this industry, signal a huge, growing appetite for access to 3-D design,” said Cosmo Wenman, who’s been creating 3-D scans of classical sculptures and releasing the files on sites like Makerbot’s Thingiverse. (Wenman, whose early efforts I wrote about here in 2011, has received backing from Autodesk.) Thanks to his scans, you can now make your own “Venus de Milo” or “Winged Victory.”
