Before you get too excited about this inkjet-looking 3D printer from HP, you’ve to know this is definitely not for your home desk top. Maybe someday it will, but for now, HP’s first 3D printer, known as Multi Jet Fusion, is strictly geared towards manufacturing businesses. It was actually announced over a week ago with the new-age blended reality desktop PC, Sprout. Anyway, with the Multi Jet Fusion, HP aims to introduce a new era of manufacturing by delivering high quality and faster product at a lower cost (keeping in mind, it’s for commercial applications). Building on HP Thermal Inkjet technology, the Multi Jet Fusion features a unique synchronous architecture that uses multiple chemical agents to, in HP own words, “resolve the fundamental limitations of current 3D printing systems.” The latter is said to enable Multi Jet Fusion to print at a speed that’s ten times faster than conventional manufacturing techniques.
However, what excites us most is the promise of the ability to control the texture, friction, strength, elasticity, and even electrical and thermal properties of the printed product and having those ‘properties’ in different parts of a single printed product. The dream by HP is big, it wants the printed to print complex parts like an electromechanical module in a single 3D build without the need to assemble. What Multi Jet Fusion has to offer is strong printed product, such as one that’s strong enough to pick up a car (see video below) and it will of course, print in super high-resolution, and in colors too. But not just colors, it says it will print colors far more accurately than any 3D printers today can achieve. However, this piece of technology is not ready just yet. It is slated to be available to manufacturers in 2016. There’s no word on the price at this point or whether such a crazy beautiful technology will eventually find its place in our homes.
