FULL Colour 3D printing!!

[philipy]

Just came across this... dread to think about how much it costs, ( Edited to add, I've just found the price... its $99,000!!!) but the ability to print in full colour with almost infinite ( 640,000) shades, is amazing.
Warning--- you have to watch/listen through excitable Nerdy Gamer speak unless you turn the sound off.

[ge_rik]

Wow!!!
In 20 years' time the printers might be affordable by we mere mortals. By then, I hope my 93 year old eyesight will be good enough to appreciate it.

Rik

[Paul_in_Ricky]

An interesting technology. A good introduction is at https://all3dp.com/2/polyjet-3d-printin ... explained/
Impressive resolution too.
At $400/kg the materials are also expensive. 640,000 colours sounds impressive, but wouldn't count as photo realistic.

[drewzero1]

So if I'm getting this right the technology is similar in concept to an inkjet printer, where tiny nozzles excite the different ink colors and splatter them onto the paper, but in this case instead of liquid ink it's little droplets of colored resin... Then at each layer the model is passed under a UV lamp which fixes the layer similar to the fuser on a laser printer.

That definitely seems like it would make 3D printing a lot more like the quality and convenience of printing on paper, aside from the cost and time of course. My kids already seem to see FDM 3D printing similar to how I saw paper printing at their age; my dad was proud of his new inkjet printer and a bit protective of his expensive color ink, but I asked him to print me coloring pages the same way my kids ask me to print a rocketship or dinosaur. To my 4-year-old son the 3D printer is just "the printer" and the laser printer is "the paper printer"... I wonder if my future grandkids will someday see something like polyjet in a similar way? Wild stuff.

Like he mentions early in the video, I get a lot of joy from painting my models, so I'm not jumping out of my seat in excitement about the full-color aspect. However, the process does address a lot of the hang-ups I have about getting a resin printer. If they came out with a monochrome version it would almost certainly replace an SLA resin printer on my wishlist.

[Peter Butler]

At the last Classic and Vintage Fair our group attended there was a girl selling 3D printed dragons, wyverns, snakes etc, all multi-coloured.
I handled some of the articulated creatures and they were of very good quality surface finish.
I asked about the colouring, expecting to be told they were airbrushed, as the colours blended smoothly into each other. She said they were printed that way, so I just accepted the technology had become widely available.
The prices asked were very affordable and she sold sufficient to book a table for next years show.

[Paul_in_Ricky]

Currently most(ie all domestic) multi colour printing is FDM, either with multi coloured filament that changes along it's length or machines that change filament mid print.
The polyjet technology is FAR more sophisticated as it can change back and forth within one layer by instruction.

[drewzero1]

I went to an aquarium expo this spring that had a table full of 3D printed critters. Some of them were multicolor but mostly due to using filament that changed color as it went along, a trick I've seen knitters use for a while.