today industrial 3d printers and my robot company, fantastic, at home we have makerbought and it is pretty crude mica dot matrix printer, the ones you buy at home take a filament in plastic, the same stuff you use for lego and melt it and squeeze it out and there are other ways, liquid resin, powder, etc.. you can go to a site where they have 3d printers and you cannot -- upload the same design, stainless steel, the quality is astounding. 3d prints, turbine blades for jet engines. there are limits to what you can do with a 3d printer but not many. the question is simply how long will it take? 15 years to get from dot matrix to photo quality ink jet on your desktop. we are not matrix phase right now, how long will it take? i don't think it will be 15 years. in part because it shares the same mechanical technology as an ink jet. the 3d printer is x why is the. interesting stuff gets into materials. right now in my printer we can do one, in plastic, pretty low resolution. the next one, two colors and the next will do three, is and mix them and you start to be able to print images as well as s