Last I knew, the best 3D prints still looked like hardened play dough
Same thing here hardly anything common with hobbyist resin printers beside using some kind of UV curable resin. And as with other 3d printing technologies Stratasys is decade ahead in terms of research and commercialization sitting on all the relevant patents and selling expensive machines (sometimes as a result of acquisition).
Once the patents ran out maybe there will be more advancements and general availability. Although I expect much longer delay compared to FDM and SLA/DLP 3d printers. Inkjet printing on paper is already complicated and finicky enough, It's not something a hobbyist can make from scratch in a garage. Add a resin which will by design solidify when exposed to light potential destroying the inkjet nozzles, and doesn't necessarily behave as regular ink when attempting to spray it through inkjet head and you get the need for some serious investment to recreate the technology even with patents expired. The recent hobbyist 2d UV printers are step in this direction, but commercial/industrial UV printers have existed for quite a while. To me this suggests there is additional gap in patents/technological challenges between textured 2d UV printers, and full 3d UV inkjet printing.
HeyGears is releasing a prosumer full color UV inkjet resin printer this year for < $2K: https://store.heygears.com/products/heygears-g1-direct
Do that hundreds or thousands of times and you eventually get Z height.
Look up the EufyMake E1 for a consumer/prosumer version.
There's nothing I personally want to bring, but these would make AMAZING gifts, cool things for your desk/bookcase, etc.
There have got to be so many interesting, educational, and cultural objects you could print like this, and the fact you can "blow up" an object like a insect is even cooler.
Depending on the price, this feels like something that could take off in a big way.
An example would be the multicolor articulated dragons that are flooding flea markets and garage sales around the world : when printed properly they are highly detailed and looked mass produced. Unsuspecting parents buy those for their kids and have zero idea these were 3D printed on $200 printers.
The 3D printing world progressed a huge lot in a few years, which is what prompted me to buy one. It progressed so much it s basically solved.
Imagine you are holding in your hand a small glassy sphere. Initially it looks like random dots inside, but as you play with it in your hands, you get glimpses of images of loved ones.
To implement this, select a bunch of photos of people, generate pseudo-3d models of their faces with your AI of choice. Position them around a sphere in a 3D modelling software, and generate a whole bunch of renderings all around the scene. Now, feed those renderings into gaussian splat software.
The resulting 3D gaussian splat should include relatively high fidelity when the viewer is aligned with the supplied iamges, but more stochastic nonsense when misaligned. This should contribute to the feeling of being able to 'find' images while rotating the sphere around.
The cube is filled with splats. Each face reveals a different picture when viewed from a perpendicular angle
5mm x 5mm x 5mm (smallest I can select): $32.58
10mm x 10mm x 10mm: $36.58
20mm x 20mm x 20mm: $82.86
30mm x 30mm x 30mm: $143.60
50mm x 50mm x 50mm: $509.14
100mm x 100mm x 100mm: $3,028.58
150mm x 150mm x 150mm: $9,618.86
195mm x 195mm x 195mm: $20,641.32
(it says it's an estimate excluding tax and shipping)
I would imagine much the same approach could be done by laminating clear plastic sheets if you can maintain the transparencey without bubbles. It would get you modern colour printer resolution in two dimensions and sheet thickness in the other.
It wouldn't surprise me if some smart cookie could make a resin printer with a resin that sets in a state reflecting different wavelengths depending on how you zap it. That's a problem left for the reader.
You could easily release pigment into resin just before it gets hardened, but getting the right pigment to the right place would be hard, A print head zapping back and forth inside the liquid doesn't sound like it would be viable.
Printing in resin bottom to top part could allow a colour print head to fly over the surface printing a pigment layer then squirting the next layer of resin on top, zap and repeat.