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Staples Starts Selling 3-D Printer 65

Posted by Soulskill from the slowly-stepping-into-the-mainstream dept.
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.'"
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Staples Starts Selling 3-D Printer More

Staples Starts Selling 3-D Printer

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  • cartridge based (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lehk228 ( 705449 ) on Friday May 03, 2013 @05:13PM (#43624891) Journal
    of course it would be a proprietary cartridge based piece of shit.

    • Re:cartridge based (Score:5, Informative)

      by EkriirkE ( 1075937 ) on Friday May 03, 2013 @05:24PM (#43624975) Homepage
      Here's the answer to that: http://www.howmuchsnow.com/cube/ [howmuchsnow.com]

      commentary on http://hackaday.com/2013/04/26/cube-3d-printer-hack-lets-you-use-bulk-filament/ [hackaday.com]

      • Re:cartridge based (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Friday May 03, 2013 @06:48PM (#43625657) Journal

        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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Aboshi ( 2893469 )

      of course it would be a proprietary cartridge based piece of shit.

      http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:76083 [thingiverse.com] looks like you dont need to go buy their cartridges ;)

    • Re:cartridge based (Score:4, Funny)

      by Mitreya ( 579078 ) <mitreya AT gmail DOT com> on Friday May 03, 2013 @05:44PM (#43625163)

      of course it would be a proprietary cartridge based piece of shit.

      but... but... these cartridges will helpfully warn you that you are running out at 50%-capacity and stop working at 30%-capacity. It is a very valuable service.

      • And they tell you if the filament is too old, because no one wants to print with ink or filament that is has been sitting in a cartridge for a whole long year

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by macraig ( 621737 )

      I've always found it hypocritical that the companies that engage in this sort of small-scale monopolistic and anti-competitive tactic - and there are thousands of them - are left completely alone by the regulatory agencies that are supposed to be preventing it.

      • So, do you buy your phone or rent it via 2 year contract? Just checking.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by macraig ( 621737 )

          I don't have a cellphone, but if I did it would be purchased outright. While that tactic is monopolistic too, it's not a direct analog to the tactic we're talking about here. It's all bad, just not precisely the same kinda bad.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          Sorry, who rents a phone via 2 year contract?

          Cell carriers do some weird stuff, but I've never seen them do that!

      • small-scale monopolistic

        lolwut

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by macraig ( 621737 )

          Slow news day for you, is it? It's what happens when a manufacturer hasn't monopolized an entire market segment but is, say, monopolizing the consumables for its product lines by preventing third party companies from producing and selling consumables more cheaply or refurbing and reselling them, etc. Slashdot has covered many examples of this tactic; the best known example was Lenovo's chipping of laser toner cartridges and then trying to abuse the DMCA to prevent competing third party compatible cartridg

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I've always found it hypocritical that the companies that engage in this sort of small-scale monopolistic and anti-competitive tactic - and there are thousands of them - are left completely alone by the regulatory agencies that are supposed to be preventing it.

        2 things.

        1) It's not monopolistic if the company doesn't have a monopoly. Their business model is the same printer business model - cheap printer (it's 30% cheaper than a Makerbot), expensive filament. If you don't want this, go buy a Makerbot or othe

    • You can just print a new one.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Id buy a cartridge if I could rent a printer to print myself a scanner to scan the 3d printer and then print myself a printer , hopefully id be able to print the cartridge next.

  • limited number of stores. (Score:3)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Friday May 03, 2013 @05:14PM (#43624911) Homepage Journal

    not in all.
    still, it's not that easy to find brick&mortar normal stores which sell 'em.

  • Staples huh... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 03, 2013 @05:21PM (#43624961)

    So it will cost 3 times what you could get it for normally?

    Seriously... Everything they sell is overpriced by at least 2x.
    They're for office workers. (where people who come get stuff don't care how much their employer spends)
    And for those emergency 'I GOTTA HAVE IT RIGHT NOW' type things.

    "And no i don't wanna join your rewards club dammit. I just want this replacement mouse. No i really don't want to join. NO! i don't want to join. Just ring this up. It's $15. Here take my money. No i don't wanna join the rewards club and i'm REALLY sure."

    • So it will cost 3 times what you could get it for normally?

      Seriously... Everything they sell is overpriced by at least 2x. They're for office workers. (where people who come get stuff don't care how much their employer spends) "

      So seriously, I can use one of these things at work now, in place of more traditional benefits?

  • Is there anything a typical na\"ive user can use?

    Thus far I've been most successful w/ OpenSCAD --- I don't think that will work for most of Staples' clientele. I've tried pretty much everything here:

    http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/CAD [shapeoko.com]

    But haven't found anything which really appeals --- is there anything I missed?

  • I love it (Score:4, Funny)

    by sml156 ( 1035136 ) on Friday May 03, 2013 @06:12PM (#43625351)
    Cool the first thing I am going to do with mine is make a ashtray for my dad
  • http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3693271&cid=43571789 [slashdot.org] Price point's only off by a cool grand and I thought Best Buy would be the first, but you can't win 'em all I guess.

  • "That's pretty cool, Sheldon. What are you printing?"

    "I'm printing some Warhammer figurines. Not the 40K ones, either. Only the real ones."

    "That...that doesn't look like a figurine."

    (looks) "What? Very nice. A cock. Ha ha, very funny."

  • Print electronic devices (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I want to be able to 3-D print electronic devices. Spare parts, or even entire phones and computers.

  • lost half the audience (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Specifically, this unit can print items up to 5.5 inches tall, wide and long in one of 16 different colors

    seems women wouldn't be too interested in this quite yet

  • Why limit length? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GrahamCox ( 741991 ) on Friday May 03, 2013 @11:52PM (#43627185) Homepage
    I don't understand why the objects need to be limited to 5.5 inches in 3 dimensions. A better design would be to have a moving base plate that allows the length to be much larger and limit the motion of the print head to two dimensions, more like a standard inkjet where the paper moves under the print head. The need to fit your object into such a small cube is a serious limitation - even letting one dimension become substantially larger would be a huge improvement in versatility and hence, likelihood of purchase.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Another issue is mass and vibration. The resolution of these printers is less than 500 micrometers. As mentioned they print in layers. Therefore the layers have to line up, perhaps to a resolution of 100 micrometers of less. This means not only does the head have to line up to that precision, but vibration has to kept to a minimum. On way to to that is to keep the machine heavy, and in particular the base on which the object is being build well attached to the machine and very heavy.

      If the plate were

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