Then he joined San Francisco-based startup Kodama, Inc., and the idea for the Trinus was developed. For a while he ordered his prototypes through third party printing bureaus like Shapeways, but ran into difficulties with long wait times and materials that didn’t work with his designs.
The Trinus was born from the frustration of Bojan Smiljanic, an industrial designer who didn’t want to invest thousands of dollars in a 3D printer that would need maintenance, upgrades, and may not meet all of his design needs. Meet the Trinus – an all-metal, professional-grade 3D printer/laser engraver hybrid. Now we’ve received word of a similarly named but very different type of printer that will be launching on Kickstarter tomorrow. Just last week we wrote about E-Mergin Innovations, whose sub-$500 TRIUM 3D printer has now surpassed its Kickstarter funding goal. And these days, those people don’t have to look far to find much less expensive alternatives – alternatives that are, depending on the customers’ needs, just as good as or better than the high-end printers that cost several thousand dollars more.ĭespite recent trends showing that overall printer prices are beginning to drop, many individuals have turned away from the larger market and have developed their own low-cost, high-quality machines that, when offered up on crowdsourcing sites, have proved to be very enticing to 3D printer enthusiasts. While there doesn’t seem to be any immediate danger of large-scale consumer abandonment for giants like 3D Systems and Stratasys – despite some recent bumps in the road – many people are put off by the high cost of 3D printers. I can’t help but wonder if large 3D printer manufacturers feel just a tinge of worry about the small startups, the open-source hackers, and the crowdsourcing campaigns that have been responsible for some of the least expensive and most ingenious printers out there.