3D Printing Goes Mainstream When Tech Giants Like HP Enter the Market

May 17, 2016 Commercial, Industrial, manufacturing , ,

We know that 3D Printing has really gone mainstream when technology product giants like Hewlett Packard enter the market.  Today at RAPID, the Society of Manufacturing Engineer’s annual rapid prototyping and additive manufacturing conference, HP Inc. launched the world’s first production-ready commercial 3D printing system.

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The Jet Fusion 3D Printing Solution has been a long-time coming and HP promises the 3D Printer delivers “superior quality physical parts up to 10 times faster and at half the cost of current 3D print systems”.  3D Printing has been limited by slow speeds which just can’t compete with traditional manufacturing methods.

CiqLgupUkAAycN0Stephen Nigro, who serves as President of HP’s 3DPrinting business explains that the “3D printing platform is unique in its ability to address over 340 million voxels per second, versus one point at a time, giving our prototyping and manufacturing partners radically faster build speeds, functional parts and breakthrough economics,” said Stephen Nigro, President of HP’s 3D printing business. “The new HP Jet Fusion 3D Printing Solution delivers a combination of speed, quality, and cost never seen in the industry.  Businesses and manufacturers can completely rethink how they design and deliver solutions to their customers.”

This, of course, is not a consumer machine.  The new Jet Fusion printers are designed for model shops and 3D print service bureaus.  HP has seen the challenge involved in such a R&D project and have collaborated with strategic partners, including Nike, BMW, Autodesk, Jabil, Johnson & Johnson, Materialise, Proto Labs, Shapeways and Siemens.

Materials and Software Open Platform 

Interestingly, HP is creating a 3D material app store and has started collaborations with certified partners including  Arkema, BASF, Evonik and Lehmann & Voss, with plans to expand the open platform ecosystem over time.  HP has also invited in software partners such as Autodesk and Siemens to make the design-to-print process easier and more intuitive.

 

Pricing and Availability
 As you would imagine, these are not cheap machines, starting at $130,000.  You can order one now, but delivery will not be made until late 2016.

But it is exciting to see HP put the resources behind 3D Printing to make it ready for true disruption of manufacturing.

 

Sarah Boisvert

About Sarah Boisvert

Sarah Boisvert has worked in digital fabrication since 1986. She co-founded the commercial division of Potomac Photonics, Inc. , a Digital Fabrication service provider in Baltimore, MD for which she consults. She is also the founder of FabLabHub , a non-profit working on digital fabrication in makerspaces that are part of the Fab Lab Network started in the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms.