Hewlett-Packard believes it has developed impressive new technology to make it easier and faster to print three-dimensional objects.
Let’s hope the grandiose way HP talks about it doesn’t get too much in the way.
HP says it has developed a 3-D printer that is 10 times faster than most of today’s 3-D printers, while remaining highly precise. The product is expected to be in testing and early production next year, and generally available in 2016. While not disclosing the expected price, HP also said it would be cheaper than what is now on the market.
“We are going after the central market,” said Stephen Nigro, a senior vice president in the company’s inkjet printing business. “We will measure the output from the printers in tons of material.”
In other words, HP wants to sell the product to big industrial companies that will print lots of things with it. Mr. Nigro said the printer would be able to print 1,000 gears, each two inches across, in three hours. The best commercial printer out there now, he said, would need 85 hours.
The other product, which the company calls Sprout, is a design-oriented computing system that combines alterable images and a keyboard that created with a light projector, along with a camera, a touchscreen and a 3-D scanner.
The technology of the scanner is probably the most novel part of that package, as the other parts have all been around awhile. That’s not bad, if it’s well packaged – remember, Apple’s iPod, the product that led to so many other successes, was really just a better-designed MP3 music player.
In addition, said Ron Coughlin, senior vice president of the consumer personal computer business, Sprout is organized “in a visual way, around containers. The market is creators.” That could be a further move away from the traditional way to store files in computing.
Sprout will go on sale Nov. 9, at a suggested price of $1,899. It already has a few software applications, in what HP unfortunately calls the Sprout “Apperating System,” and hopes to build a significant community of outside developers.
HP says this is the first time it’s tried to build a developer base, perhaps ignoring efforts during its short-lived efforts with products from its acquisition of Palm.
So far, so good. The most problematic thing about these two products is the way HP is introducing them, with an hours-long presentation of what it calls “its new Blended Reality ecosystem…designed to break down the barriers between the digital and physical worlds.”
Blowing away the marketing smoke, HP’s efforts to make 3-D printing an everyday thing are fascinating. The new printer has inkjet heads that can spit 350 million ink drops a second, with 21 microns, or millionths of a meter, between the drops.
It is entering a very small market, in what advocates say are its earliest days. Gartner recently said that worldwide sales of 3-D printers will be about 217,000 units in 2015. By contrast, in the United States alone, shipments of regular printers are typically about 24 million units a year.
For 3D printers, “this is like 1982 for personal computers, things are just getting started,” said Carl Bass, chief executive of Autodesk, another champion of 3-D designing and printing. “I’m good with all the stuff that moves the field forward.”
“Someone told me that there are 275 3-D printing companies in the world now,” Mr. Bass said. “All of us benefit when a big company comes into the business.” Where Autodesk and others might compete, he said, was in design for engineers. Sprout doesn’t seem aimed at that market.