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AM Europe Show, the biggest announcements

VoxelMattersJuly 1, 2016

2 minutes read

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Even though the first edition was a difficult—but necessary—transition from the consumer-focused 3DPrintshow to a more professional-level trade show, the first AM Europe show can be considered a success. Not many visitors, numerically speaking, but a much more qualified professional target, which makes for better business. For many companies—Ultimaker and Zortrax in particular—the show was an opportunity to make some big announcements (quite literally in the case of Zortrax’s M300). These two companies, more than others, represent the possibilities that the consumer 3D printing hype created. They were born as consumer projects and they were able to evolve into real and structured multinational companies. Jos Burger, Ultimaker’s CEO, is perhaps one of the best representations of this trend as he brought a global multinational mentality to a young startup. He explained that “there is no doubt that people are moving away from the hyped up consumer 3D printing idea. No one is talking about it anymore. Now it is all about the industry and the incredible possibilities that 3D printing can offer to professionals at all levels.” The truth is that desktop 3D printing is far from dead: instead of bringing a 3D printer in every house, it made it possible for everyone who wanted to to invent a new profession, opening up the previously inaccessible manufacturing and prototyping market to more people than ever before. This is resulting and will continue to result in more innovation than ever. Here are some photo galleries from the best new things we saw at the show.

Zortrax M300

Even though it is not a huge technological innovation, Zortrax’s M300 is a big innovation for the many professional 3D printing services that have made the reliability of Zortrax’s 3D printer their main asset. It also show that the company understood it made a huge little mistake with the Inventure, going in the opposite direction as what the market was asking.

Sharebot Voyager WARP

Sharebot is another company that shows how 3D printing made it possible to achieve incredible results. Starting from a reprap desktop machine a small team of Star Trek-inspired young Italian entrepreneurs created a company and were able to develop some of the most advanced innovations in low cost 3D printing, offering DLP, SLA, SLS and now even the new Continuous DLP technology with the Voyager WARP system.

Rokit low-cost bioprinter

Low-cost professional 3D printing also means that a South Korean company like Rokit can bring its $20,000 bioprinter to the table.

Mass Portal’s high res nozzles

Latvia based Mass Portal designed and developed a new set of nozzles for its line up of desktop Delta 3D printers. The 5 micron resolution and detail that can be achieved easily rivals most SLA and DLP machines, something that seemed impossible until just a short time ago. How’s that for innovation?

3Dee and 3DPandora full Color binder jetting

For more than a decade 3D Systems and Zcorp produced and sold their full color binder jetting technology with no competition. Now new players like 3DPandora are hitting the market and driving the system’s price down from $60K to $20K, with even better final quality.