Not sure you Barbie "lovers" appreciate the scale of this.

These machines will be printing aluminium ( 660c Melting point ) within 3 years and other sintered metals within 10. At the moment you yanks are still fairly good at design but are getting everything made in China. This technology offers you a chance to save your national economy.

There going to be a mad scramble to 3D-Scan everthing, (imagine the copyright privacy issue's when you can down load a new set of carbs for a 67-vette)

Also think about nano=faxing, with a 3D scanner one end and a 3D printer the other or
going down to a bodyshop and having a new fender printed ...awesome

http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/extras/articles/jay-lenos-3d-printer-replaces-rusty-old-parts-1

or read

All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson

Recycling is really going to get a boost as well, who's going to want to throw away aluminium or plastic when you get use it as a Toner-Refill instead.

Will be individualized plastic figures for wargames.

modification they like, say one to look like their friends etc.

Are capable of making that assembly assembled with moving parts. These would be the ultimate unrepairable things as it's impossible to pull them apart they have no screws just different moldings one inside the other.

Think of a shifting spanner as a 1 piece assembly so when something breaks or wears out you just dump it and print off another one.

Col

Once spare parts can be fabricated for a variety of machines wouldn't you run into difficulties with assembly, as many of these products will not have been designed to be taken apart and reassembled by the consumer.
I guess that it will be beholden on the manufacturer to redesign products for relative ease of assembly, although can't see a commercial motivation for doing so, or maybe there will be a movement to make open-source alternatives that are easy to assemble.

The feedstock for these machines generally needs to be very pure, so recycling is still going to need a factory or some sort. Once the whole thing ramps up, I think this will be a major part of the market.

Send us your old prints and we'll send it back as feedstock so you can make something new.

I guess as we get further down the track, the recycling process will be miniaturized so we can have our own, but that's going to require the economies of scale that we see in the PC industry.

Thinking about it, the PC revolution is probably a good model for what we'll see with 3D printing. First the geeks and the curious hobbyists get into it with the devices from this article which are much like the sort of "personal computers" you could buy or build back in the late 70's. Later we'll see some standardisation, more reliable and versatile printers that don't need as much skill to use, much like the original IBM PC and it's clones.

Can't wait. This looks like a great toy to keep me entertained in my retirement years.