Brooklyn, New York-based MakerBot has been making affordable 3D printers since 2009, bringing "Desktop fabrication machines" to everyone. MakerBot unveiled its new 3D printer, Replicator 2, at an event in New York on Sept. 12.
The latest 3D printer has an attractive steel exterior and its build plate is fairly big. Performance-wise, it has been upgraded from the original Replicator. The build volume is now 410 cubic inches, and printouts will be 37 percent larger than the original. It comes fully assembled.
CEO of MakerBot Bre Pettis expects "Engineers and architects to be salivating over this."
The second generation Do-it-Yourself 3D printers are cooler and simpler, one just needs to load the digital copy into the tool's MakerWare software and then put it to print, and it churns out a plastic-based object from the digital copy. The plastic is corn-based.
Replicator 2 is better than its predecessor and has an eye for details. It can create objects in layers, with a 100-micron thickness in each of them. Gizmodo reported that Pettis showed a planetary object that the printer had churned out and it was "pretty polished."
"The printing process used to take hours-now it happens in seconds," said Pettis. The new software has made the printing process 20 times faster than its predecessor.
The printer runs on a new software tool, MarkerWare, in which multiple models can be dragged and dropped into a virtual build platform and can be scaled and tweaked before it goes into Replicator 2, Endgadget said.
Replicator 2 is priced $2,199. Replicator 2X Experimental printer, a high-end printer that can deal with dual-extrusion and ABS plastic, is priced $2,799 and will be available in 2013.
The company has 125 employees and has opened up a new store in Manhattan. Given their current rate of progress, they may grow to compete with printing giants Xerox and HP in the coming years.
