3D printing just got real: The MakerBot Digitizer is up for pre-order

3D printing just got real: The MakerBot Digitizer is up for pre-order

As with most emerging technologies,3D printing has been coming down in price and finding a wider audience. It wasn’t long ago that buying a 3D printer meant assembling it and soldering connections yourself. Those complicated, easily-broken printers have evolved to become more consumer-friendly, and no company is more involved in this shift than MakerBot. The company has been teasing the next phase in 3D printing for a few weeks, and today is the big day. The MakerBot Digitizer lets you turn a real world object into a digital file fit for printing, and it’s now available for pre-order.

Consumer-oriented 3D printers have reached the point where moderately tech savvy individuals are able to load up almost any suitable file and get good results. Producing the 3D file which instructs the printer where to lay down melted plastic is a much more difficult process. The software needed to design a good model from scratch is complicated and definitely not as consumer-focused as the printers themselves.

The MakerBot Digitizer completely changes the game, not because it’s the first 3D scanner, but because its the first one that regular folks can afford and learn how to use. 3D printing enthusiasts always had the option to poke around on sites like Thingiverse to find pre-made 3D models to print, but the Digitizer allows them to make copies of any object that fits in the scanner — it democratizes the process from beginning to end.

The MakerBot Digitizer will cost $1400 with an optional $150 service plan. The device looks a bit like an old record player with a spinning turntable where the item being scanned sits. An armature attached to the turntable houses two lasers which essentially act as rangefinders as the object spins around. They track the curves and lines of the entire surface, eventually recording hundreds of thousands of points in three dimensions. The MakerWare software suite takes all those points and assembles a digital mesh, ready for printing.

The entire process only takes 12 minutes, and the scan is accurate to within 2.0mm. The Digitizer isn’t going to be great for making a digital scan of larger items — its has a maximum scannable area of 8 x 8 inches, and the turntable can support up to 6.6lbs. Think knickknack-size objects.

MakerBot is encouraging early adopters to upload items they scan to Thingiverse so others, who are not so lucky as to have their own 3D scanner, can reap the benefits as well. Being able to recreate your personal real world objects is one thing, but the explosion of freely available content in the 3D ecosystem might be the most important impact of the MakerBot Digitizer.

This could actually end up a bit of a headache for MakerBot and parent company Stratasys. The overwhelming majority of 3D files online right now are made from scratch — custom jobs. As it becomes easier to make copies of pre-existing objects and Thingiverse balloons, the people who made the originals might get a little irked. There are still many intellectual property concerns when it comes to 3D printing. Some print-on-demand companies won’t print something they even suspect to be a rendering of a copyrighted item. The Digitizer might force the legal system to finally decide what role 3D scanning and printing can play in the future.