3-D Printers Can Produce Just About Any Item—Coming to Households Soon?

Printers that can produce three-dimensional objects could become a highly sought-after item in the near future.

Rapid fabrication printers have been around for at least two decades and were used for aerospace and car companies, costing millions, according to a report by CNN Money on Monday.

Rajeev Kulkarni, the vice president of global engineering at 3D Systems, told CNN that a “printer” that can manufacture a set of keys, a chair, or a shirt has been around for some time now, and estimates that the cheapest ones on the market five years ago ran from $25,000 to $50,000. However, the prices have dropped to around $1,000 to $2,000.

“We’ve been doing 3-D printing for 25 years,” Kulkarni told the news agency. “We’ve had production systems and large systems for a long time. This is our attempt now to get at the consumer level, where we make 3-D printing accessible to the mass market.”

A Live Science report released last month notes that a small-scale printer the size of a carton of orange juice is being produced by the Vienna University of Technology. It weighs three pounds and costs around $1,700.

And what material do such devices use to “print” and fabricate items? The university said that a type of resin which “hardens precisely where it is illuminated with intense beams of light” is used to make the objects.

“Layer for layer, the synthetic resin is irradiated at exactly the right spots. When one layer hardens, the next layer can be attached to it, until the object is completed,” the university added, according to Live Science.