6d ago

Anker's 3D texture printer raises $45 million in most successful Kickstarter campaign ever — world's first UV printer for personal use to begin shipping in August

www.tomshardware.com Anker's 3D texture printer raises $45 million in most successful Kickstarter campaign ever — world's first UV printer for personal use to begin shipping in August

This 3D texture printer has definitely made an impression.

Anker's 3D texture printer raises $45 million in most successful Kickstarter campaign ever — world's first UV printer for personal use to begin shipping in August

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Not trying to be dismissive but what’s the use case for this? Seems limited but I’ve never heard of a texture printer before.
- UV printers are used for direct to object printing, you likely own some stuff that has gone through the process. It's especially popular for customized promotional items that would be otherwise difficult to print on, like flash drives, golf balls, etc.
  Admittedly, I also don't see much of a reason to buy this for my own use, but one could say the same about other hobbies like 3d printing.
  Edit: fixed a typo and formatting
  
  So I have a small business where we print our down designs. We almost got one of these, but canceled. I can't justify the price for what I can use it for. We were going to get it to print onto containers but printing onto vinyl and using a cutting machine would be cheaper than the UV ink and wouldn't make a noticeable difference for our use. Also printing on to things one at a time is just going to be so slow. I hand paint onto the 3D prints using acrylics and then use a thin layer of UV resin to all an enamel like finish. Its pretty quick to line up a bunch of prints and hand stroke the colors on one at a time with a brush. Its also cheaper because that ink is still a whopping $300 a refill i think. For personal use, it might be warranted. It seems so cool and I really want one, but even with it being so affordable for what it is, I can't justify the price.
  
  That's cool as hell. My understanding is you have to have extremely high volume before uv makes financial sense. The previously-available commercial uv printers are extremely expensive, so the anker printer is only cheap by comparison. Hopefully we will see some more competition at this level that will continue to bring the price down towards something more affordable!
  
  Cool. Thanks!
- Use it to print cheap plastic knick knacks with generic farmhouse graphics generated by AI to sell to your unsuspecting followers. No joke there was a YouTuber who made a video about doing exactly this.

15 comments