Staples Starts Selling 3-D Printer 65
An anonymous reader writes "Soon anyone will be able to head out to the store and buy a 3D printer: 'Staples, one of the leading office supply retailers in the U.S. announced it would begin selling 3-D Systems' entry level personal 3-D printer, The Cube. This is quite simply the single largest 3-D printer retail move to date by any 3-D printer manufacturer.' 'The Cube is one of a number of 3-D printers designed with traditional consumers in mind. Specifically, this unit can print items up to 5.5 inches tall, wide and long in one of 16 different colors. The retail bundle includes 25 free design templates to get users started but the real fun is designing and building something all your own.'"
cartridge based (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:cartridge based (Score:4, Insightful)
The solution [Chris] went with still uses the cartridges to ‘trick’ the machine into printing. Basically the interface will tell you that you don’t have enough filament left, but as long as there’s a cartridge in place you can tell it to print anyway.
In other words, this hardware hack is only one firmware update away from being shut down. Once they remove the option to "tell it to print anyway" when the cartridge says it's empty, then the hack is no longer usable.
Why limit length? (Score:4, Insightful)