Over the time Hackaday has been in existence, the art of 3D printing has evolved from a relatively crude hit-and-miss affair to something approaching what we all imagined back then. You can’t yet walk up to a Star Trek replicator and ask for a part, but a modern state of the art consumer or prosumer grade printer will deliver consistent high-resolution parts, and in a surprisingly short time. [The Next Layer] asks whether consumer FDM printers have now reached the point at which they’re about as good as they’re going to get, and whether other technologies hold the future.
It’s a fair point to make that the resolution of a consumer FDM printer may be close to its mechanical limit. Techniques such as input shaping and the adoption of better CoreXY mechanisms mean that prints which once might have relied on SLA can be done in FDM. Healthy competition in the marketplace has delivered high quality colour printing, with tool-changing printers being no longer solely the preserve of the professional. He uses the example of a mobile phone to make the point that new machines have less of a wow factor to deliver, as increments have become less grand.
It’s a persuasive argument, and looking at the printers around us we can see it in action. The difference in ability between a 2020-ish and a 2026 FDM printer are far smaller than those between the same time periods in the last decade. Compare a MakerBot Cupcake and an Ultimaker II, or the Ultimaker and a Prusa Mini, and each is light years ahead of the last. But the best the Mini can do is surprisingly not as far behind as you’d expect to that of their latest, or of the equivalent from Bambu Labs.
Does this means that nothing new is coming in 3D printing? Of course not. UV printing is coming through and will deliver incredible results, as will SLS printing. It’s interesting he devotes little time to SLA printing, perhaps because it’s not as easy a process as FDM. He makes the point that we’ve never had it so good, as the high-end FDM features will appear in modestly priced machines, and we have those other technologies to look forward to.
It’s an interesting discussion, and you can see it below the break.
I think one of the next changes will be closed loop linear motors / actuators
not sure of the speed of them, but it simplifies the drive chain a lot
There’s looks to be something in the works to rival the Magneto X: https://youtu.be/_aR8Hvfgscs?is=2NB_gAl-2XaUJVAz
Why does he talk like that. That’s some ai weirdness. No one says the G in ghost, g host.
Closed loop linear actuators are by no means simpler then stepper motors. And more costly. They also can have the tendency to introduce vibrations while “standing still” which isn’t great for 3D printing.
That might be a cost cutting measure, but if you want to up the game for quality you actually have to go for cascaded actuators: broad movements using belts and leadscrews, fine position by galvo or piezo actuators.
Think of a CD player mechanism: there’s a very simple leadscrew that brings the lens to the approximate track location, and the magnetic cradle carrying the lens can shift it around to do the actual tracking.
There’s a large scale concrete printer that does the same thing with a 6+ DOF robot arm on the end of the long concrete pumping boom to stabilize the print head.
I still use Ultimaker II,it runs 1000 hours,only the oled broken.
The oled screen is a very common 128×64 I2C OLED screen, should be easy to source a new one.
And, yes, if I compare my Ultimaker Origonal to my Prusa Core One+. The main differences are less stringing on the Prusa, a better/easier build plate, wifi and end-of-filament detection. Printing quality and speed do not differ that much (if you have prints that do not suffer from stringing)
I think the future will rely on a combination of approaches….3D print head followed by a subtractive bit that hones things down even more closely
Floating titanium prints?
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-world-titanium.html
Milling thermoplastic is a bit like drilling aluminum. It gets gummy and sticks to things. The laser finishes might be a more reliable method of smoothing things out, but honing could be tough.
FDM without filament:
https://hackaday.io/project/181165-direct-granules-extruder-fdm-prints-from-powder
I saw a color fdm printer prototype that used a screw extruder to melt and feed pellets into electrically heated teflon tubes transporting melted plastic to a printhead with a (much smaller) motorized screw mixer that blended the CMYKW melts together as they extruded. That was probably 10 years ago so I guess it didnt go much further since Ive not seen a “hotmelt tube FDM” since
Pyrolysis in the PTFE tubes is mostly a hard limit when it comes to using it as a thermal insulator. It’s a shame, the material is so useful otherwise.
I think theres a lot of room for FDM advancement. We have very little commercial availability in the way of nonplanar printers or multiaxis (beyond 3) printers. I mean we are really just starting to see practical systems for multimaterial printing hitting the market.
Unless 3D printing is as low maintenance as my laser-paper printer that just spits out the file after months of sitting in the corner it still needs a lot of advancements.
From my view this will never happen, 3D printing will always be as fiddly as inkjet paper printers and therefore a process for people with a pain threshold way higher than mine.
Same reason in several decades of hacking and tinkering I never did etch a PCB myself.
I’d say the nicer consumer FDM printers you can buy today compare favorably to inkjet printers, but the comparison isn’t that far off. I can fix my own 3D printer though, which makes the fiddlyness a lot more tolerable in my opinion.
At Ultimaker we always joked that the 2D printers where giving more problems then our giant fleet of 3D printers. While they can be a bit fiddly, 3D printer reliability has come a long way. And so far, my Prusa Core One+ I only had issues with entangled (cheap) spools.
I always appreciate your comments and contributiona to 3d printing, Daid. Thanks for sticking around.
My Ultimaker didn’t survive my last move intact, but I still have all the hardware. Maybe one day I’ll laser out the birch again.
Running any machine professionally is never a problem – it’s a job. =)
Been there, done that. That included some high maintenance colorproofing inkjets and chemical labs. It’s the hobby or small office threshold that is the real challenge. Not using a machine for days, weeks, months and then having to redo all the tedious work to get it running again. Instead of getting results all the free time is spent on fighting the machine. Hence the comparison with laser paper printers vs inkjets. One will print instantly, the other needs cleaning cycles, can have dried up cartridges and so on.
If you can tell me you can walk away from your fleet of your 3D printers for three months, come back and EVERYTHING works exactly as the moment you left without raising a single finger – please tell me what machines, filaments etc you are using, I will buy that stuff yesterday. I am serious, no sarcasm here.
My rostock max v2 is there, if you don’t include wiping the dust off the glass bed. It gets used once or twice a year but it’s print and go. Thus far my voron seems to be in the same boat as far as ‘sit idle, hit go, and print’. Both compare to my laser printer for reliability, except that the laser printer seems to enjoy going to deep sleep and doesn’t want to connect to wifi even after pulling the power.
My Creality K1 gives the same mediocre print every time, but I admit that if the pla filament I mostly use gets left out to absorb moisture it does need drying after a few months during the wetter part of the year.
Presenting my DIY robot with a DIY etched PCB during interview is how I got my first embedded engineering job after university. Boss was pretty impressed that, unlike many other applicants, I could actually walk the walk and make stuff instead of just putting bullshit in my CV. I got hired on the spot.
I used to think like that. Bambu stuff is pretty much there, filament issues aside (eg wet filament)
I think with the proliferation of tool changer we’ll see a change. I think that is still a new technology that will see more development. We’re getting useful multimaterial now and multiple nozzle sizes. From the sounds of things on the software side with prusa getting prusa slicer 3 workable (still alpha) we’ll see prints where the printer can do different nozzle sizes for different levels of detail, maybe for improved strength, better integration of incompatible materials where the software will automatically blend the materials (say for tpu hinge and petg body). Full spectrum is only a year or so old and I think it has got some more work to be done.
Tool changers, 5-axis, hotter build chamber and print temps, filament material advances, and non-planer slicing are all things yet to be common that i think would bring fdm printing to it’s peak. We’re not there yet.
Nope! FFF printing is nowhere near it’s potential peak!
No, I’m not arguing against (or for) claims that it has reached the limits of what is mechanically possible in terms of resolution, precision or even reliability.
But there is still a LOT of untapped potential in the things that we print.
There are a lot of things left to model. And better than modeling… programming. There is still a lot left on the table when it comes to parametric designs. It could take a generation to get there but we should be trying to get to a point where pretty much anything physically possible to print is just a download away.
And when it comes down to it.. most people will use FFF not SLA or any other current processes to do so. Feeding a spool of clean plastic into an FFF printer is always going to be a lot more palatable then pouring a bottle of goo into an SLA printer, then pulling out the still soft and sticky print only to have to dunk it in a vat of alcohol and then pull it out of that to bake in a UV oven.
We may be approaching the point where there aren’t a lot of huge developments in the printer hardware itself. Or maybe we are just a big idea no one has had yet away from a ton more development. Either way, there is a lot more to go in the way of building the library of things to print.
And then of course there is the slicer! People who have kept up to date buying the latest printers over the last 20 years might not realize this but a LOT of the improvement has been in the slicer software, not the printer hardware. Pull out an old printer and try it with a current slicer.. you might just be surprised what it can do.
So… about that… non-planar slicing. That has the potential to be big!
i’m probably not personally interested in any advancements in FDM that seem particularly likely. like, multi-color may keep improving but i’m not really interested in it. closed loop control and better extruder pressure control will be nice but i don’t expect to see a huge improvement in precision…probably nothing that will alter how i use it. probably the biggest thing to look forward to is a better plastic…i don’t know what that would look like but it seems like there has been a pretty steady march in terms of developing new filaments and better extruders/heaters that are capable of pushing them out.
but imo non-filament deposition (pumped resin or deposited metal) seems likely to take off at some point, and might be a game changer.
It seems like everyone is going to multi-color which is where they think the market is (trinkets) and they are probably right. But I’m far more interested in technical materials and usable mechanical parts – my QIDI has been pumping out nylon parts using a very high resolution profile mostly nonstop since I got it.
For significant advancement to happen the printers will necessarily get more expensive. I welcome this actually – it’s stunning the quality I can get for several hundred dollars, I would be willing to pay more for a 4D or 5D headed printer or any other method of building parts with Z strength that matched XY strength and somehow smoothing out the finish.