3D printing business small parts fabricators in Australia - where to find?

That's mostly why I'm holding off buying my own 3D printer, I'm waiting for them to become so common it's not overly expensive to go out and get a good one.
And hoping it doesn't take 10 years for the technology to become that accessible.

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Originally Posted by Tober

The last few years has seen a huge increase in practicality and decrease in price. You can get a good FDM printer for around $400, but you will need to be willing to understand how it works when it acts up (which it will). A good STL resin printer can be bought for around $850 now - I'm seriously considering it, but they are really messy and dangerous. A high-end Form2 will set you back about $6000.

Yeah, circa 1990 a color printer had to be licensed with the police and cost aprox $10 000 and tool about 30 mins to print a color page. A few years later you could get a decent bubble-jet for about $500 (roughly where we are now). Now you can get a vastly superior Canon Pixma for less than $20. :o

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If you get a resin printer I'll be your best customer. I'm holding off buying one because of cost and toxicity, but I've heard good things about the Elegoo Mars printer at sub $400USD.

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Originally Posted by gamblor916

If you get a resin printer I'll be your best customer. I'm holding off buying one because of cost and toxicity, but I've heard good things about the Elegoo Mars printer at sub $400USD.

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I was considering the Anycubic Photon, but I'll check out the Elegoo. :)

The Photon gets a mention here:

https://www.cnet.com/news/best-3d-pr...dget-creators/

I like the fine detail of those Resin printers, but not so crazy about the resin vats and the toxicity of the chemicals involved.
From the sounds of it, if I was to hypothetically set up a resin printer, I'd need to make a dedicated workbench in my garage and open the sliding door everytime I did a print.
Could they possibly make a fine detail printer without the toxic vat substances one day?

Do they always need to have LCD screens though?
I don't know if it applies to 3D printers, but for the paper printers, the inclusion of a LCD control panel sometimes doubled or tripled the price, due to the associated hardware/firmware/software functions connected to whatever the LCD screen was controlling.
Which is why I prefer not to have them, if it knocks down the price a fair bit, an incomputer control interface is perfectly acceptable.

Are these printers compatible with MacOS?
I do all of my modelling on a Mac Desktop unit, so would need something that can be controlled from a Mac system.



I don't remember the name of the plastic type involved, but when I was taking my first training sessions in 3D printing, we were told we could print anything EXCEPT cups to drink out of.
Something about how the material is safe to handle, but not safe to consume drinks out of.
By logical extension, that would mean you can't print a plate either.

Which got me wondering, I saw a comedy scene in a tv show about a person obsessed with 3D printing, his date drops her eating fork and he tries to print her one to replace it, to show off his portable 3D printer.
But could she actually use the fork to eat with afterwards or would it be considered hazardous?