Will the government try to ban 3D printers?

nope, people have been building homemade guns, food and houses for years

No of course stuff won't be free. Current 3-D printers are like inkjets. You might have noticed they don't print newspapers like that, and it costs you about $1 in ink to print a photo. Same with 3D printers - the spools of plastic aren't cheap, so you could probably make a custom plastic fork for $1 that would cost $0.02 new in a pack of 50.

But yeah, there's some cool stuff going on, trying to print body parts and stuff.

Huh? That was aimed at the person who says no, because the 1st Amendment (freedom of religion, speech, or assembly) protects it? This is not a printer that prints words. It produces 3d objects.

and yes, there are already government morons trying to restrict who can own/operate them via licensing. None of the bills have passed .. yet, but they are trying! I guess they are afraid that criminals will buy them so that they can make their own guns. That would cost much more than their present system of stealing the guns they want, so I wouldn't worry about that as much as people remaining armed when a stupid government takes away their legal firearms as part of the "disarm America to stop crime" movement.

The finished products are not cheap, as the technology is still new and thus the materials used are still relatively expensive. The software files require good computer skills to produce, so producing a file is tedious and if hired out, expensive.

It is a very potentially good future industry, but at the moment only viable for those with the proper connections and marketing skills. The only reason I haven't purchased one for myself is that it would be an investment that wouldn't pay for itself. I don't have the contacts to make it profitable.

Possibly some idiots that have never actually examined the technology...

It's a lot slower and more expensive to make a simple plastic or metal object with a 3D printer than it is to simply buy it..

The object is built up in layers a few thousandths of an inch at a time and the supplies to run a printer are not free.

Each class of printer only works with certain types of materials; the simplest use meltable plastic, others use eg. light-setting plastic or powdered metal.

Printing foods is a laboratory novelty or gimmick; you have to have the foods in some form already (eg. dried egg, "instant" mashed potato and so on) which obviously you would have to buy..

"Printing" drugs is science fiction - the chemical processing needed to create each needs major chemical processing equipment as well as raw materials...

A "House printer" exists; you can hire that, you have to buy the concrete mix to load in to it that it then extrudes - and yet again, that is not free...


The things 3D printers are really good for are engineering prototypes or just one-offs where having someone else make an item would cost far more.

They are also good for novelty items & designs can be shared so anyone with a suitable printer can make their own copy of an item - eg. like this that someone created and published - I did for a young relative:
(including it's stand [not in the picture], there is about 35 hours of "print time" to do this)

[Original article: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:330127 ]

no

No. First amendment protects it.