Hewlett-Packard plans to announce an agreement worth more than $100 million to supply Ford Motor with printing, hardware, software and services, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The program will offer three months of intensive, hands-on training in printing, hardware, laser-cutting, silk-screening and other trade work with a focus on job placement at the end.
One option would be to go after the makers of the printing hardware, but that would be a misguided approach centered on a general-purpose technology with many legal uses, Professor Desai said.
"This is not exactly 3D printing hardware as it was before," Goshen tells me.
This is not exactly 3D printing hardware as it was before.
The 3D printer craze shows no signs of stopping and Kickstarter is full of exciting examples of new printing hardware.
Similarly, for 3D printing, one strategy may include carefully developed phantoms that, once printed, can undergo standardized tests and measurements to establish the accuracy of the 3D printing hardware and software pipeline.
Rivals Eastman Kodak and Fuji Photo Film have largely dominated the retail digital printing hardware market with kiosks and minilabs installed in big retail chains, drugstores and supermarkets such as Wal-Mart, Walgreen and Costco Wholesale.
While phantoms can be used to test the accuracy of 3D printing hardware, to date there are no measures of quality and benchmarks for the accuracy and reproducibility of STL models generated from DICOM images for 3D printing.
The emergence of free and open-source software tools, the reduction in price of 3D printing hardware and the creation of new 3D printing materials are all factors that continually increase the accessibility of these technologies.
