Consumer-level 3D printing has certainly revolutionized what can be made at home. Although the materials generally used wouldn’t be suitable for, say, structural automotive parts, the shapes that one can easily create with one of these printers would be very difficult to make using traditional machining methods. Sure, if you happen to have a 5-axis machining center in your garage, you could duplicate many of these results, but the fact that many of these machines cost in the hundreds of dollars rather than many tens or even hundreds of thousands for a CNC machining “equivalent” is really an accomplishment.
On the other hand, these machines, especially the least-expensive of them, require some fiddling to get them working. You’ll also need an external computer to prepare your models for printing, and if you’d like to duplicate a physical object via 3D scanning, that’s an entirely different machine/process.
For a different take on things, the Zeus Printer/Editor/3D scanner works as a 3D printer, but also has a 3D scanner built-in as well as a 7-inch touchscreen and editing capabilities. So in theory, you don’t even need a computer to work with this device. The first video below shows an overview of the device, while the second shows a demonstration of it working as a “simple” 3D copy machine.
