HP marks 10 years of 3D printing with the MJF 1200 and a growing business

At its recent media day, HP marked 10 years since it first showed the world Multi Jet Fusion, the powder bed fusion technology that became the foundation of its 3D printing business. VoxelMatters sat down separately with two of the people who built that business from the inside: Alex Monino, SVP and GM of Additive Manufacturing Solutions at HP, who joined the 3D printing effort in 2013 and has run the commercial side of it since, and Sascha de Peña Hempel, Distinguished Technologist for the 3D Printing Business at HP, who was on the founding technical team and now holds what amounts to a CTO role for the division.

Between them, the two conversations trace the arc from a blank sheet of paper in the early 2010s to a business Monino said is now growing at 25 percent and to the launch of the HP 1200, the company’s newest and most accessible MJF system.

From a blank sheet to industrial production

De Peña Hempel joined HP in 2000 in the large format printing group, working on the writing systems that place ink drops on paper, and became chief engineer on one of those product lines before HP began exploring 3D printing around 2010, running a pilot with Stratasys’ uPrint system across five European countries. When HP’s leadership decided against an OEM strategy and instead asked for an organic, disruptive technology, de Peña Hempel was part of the small team tasked with figuring out what that would even look like.

“In the beginning, the greatest challenge is that we didn’t know what we wanted. It was a blank sheet of paper. “Come up with a disruptive technology,” he said. The team surveyed SLS, FDM, and resin-based systems, weighing each against its scalability. SLS offered strong mechanical properties but low throughput; resin-based DLP systems had already made the jump from point-based to layer-based exposure that powder bed systems had not, and FDM did not appear to be a large enough market. With a small team and limited resources, HP eventually focused on powder diffusion, using high-speed sintering research and a detailing-agent concept taken from selective inhibition sintering work at the University of Southern California. “I wouldn’t say it’s an invention. It’s like putting assets together,” de Peña Hempel said of how Multi Jet Fusion came together.

Both executives pushed back on the idea that HP ever seriously considered abandoning the business. “Scaling down all the expectations, probably yes,” de Peña Hempel said, pointing to a reduced team focused on metal 3D printing on the West Coast as HP refocused toward profitability. But he said doubt about the underlying technology’s capabilities and potential was never an issue.

Monino, who joined the effort a year before HP unveiled the technology in 2014 and moved to it full-time between 2015 and 2016, further described these initial challenges: it was less about internal doubt and more about recalibrating amid a wave of industry-wide overhype. “I think the most difficult time was when we as an industry had a set of expectations. Everybody… I think that was probably the time when we saw that the market was not growing as we had expected,” he said, noting that other 3D printing companies that went public at high valuations did not survive the correction that followed. COVID added its own disruption, freezing some investment while opening new applications HP could serve when other supply chains could not.

Best moment yet

A decade on, both executives describe HP’s 3D printing unit as being in its strongest position since launch. “We’re growing at a 25 percent rate. There aren’t many businesses that grow so,” Monino said, adding that HP does not see the current momentum as a peak but as a sustained trend, with the US growing fastest, Asia and other parts of Europe close behind, and Germany comparatively flat. He was candid that HP’s own early expectations for the technology, including assumptions about how quickly a broad materials portfolio would materialize, did not fully play out. Adoption has proven more behavioral than technical. Monino pointed to a customer in the agriculture sector running two tractor models from the same company, one with roughly 150 3D printed parts and another with just three, a gap he attributed to how forward-thinking one engineering team was relative to the other rather than to any difference in the underlying business case.

On where growth is concentrated, Monino said HP measures its business by parts rather than by machines installed, since part demand ultimately drives machine purchases. Automotive is growing from a small base; orthotics and prosthetics continue to expand even though digital adoption in that space remains below 8 percent; and defense and drone applications, both aerial and underwater, represent another huge growth area.

He also flagged data centers, where thermal management needs are pushing demand for both metal and polymer parts, and robotics, where he said machines at outside service bureaus are already filling up with orders from robotics companies still in the prototyping phase of product development. De Peña Hempel echoed the drone opportunity from the technical side, noting the pace of iteration in that market, while cautioning that the segment has not yet scaled.

Both executives addressed competition, particularly from Chinese manufacturers producing SLA and SLS systems at large scale and lower cost. De Peña Hempel said HP has seen clones of its printers appear in China, including designs based on high-speed sintering, but argued that HP’s install base in the region still trades on part quality rather than price and that a lower-quality tier of the market will likely coexist with HP’s premium position rather than displace it.

Monino spoke specifically about strategy: “We don’t compete on price, but we compete on quality,” he said, describing HP’s position in China as that of the leading foreign MJF brand and pointing to productivity and machine reliability as the factors that narrow the effective cost gap even where per-unit list pricing does not. On why no other large technology company, from Xerox to Ricoh to Apple, ever made a comparable bet on 3D printing despite holding patents in the space, both pointed to the same answer: HP had a genuine technology differentiator, built on decades of thermal inkjet development that gave Multi Jet Fusion a foundation none of those companies could easily replicate. “We bring a differentiation, a disruption to the market with MJF… built on a set of assets that we alone at the 3D printing division would never be able to afford,” Monino said.

The HP MJF 1200 and what comes next

The centerpiece of HP’s anniversary media day was the HP MultiJet Fusion 1200, the newest addition to the company’s MJF lineup and, according to Monino, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between early product development and production-ready manufacturing.

“The [HP MJF] 1200 represents a fundamental step of bringing a production-ready technology into the hands of early product development,” he said, describing a common pattern among HP’s customers in which parts prototyped on one technology later prove unsuitable for production because of volume, quality or tolerance requirements, forcing a costly redesign. Because the 1200 runs the same MJF process used in HP’s production systems, Monino said customers can prototype, qualify and even run short production batches on the same machine before scaling to in-house production or an outside contractor using the same technology, avoiding that redesign cycle entirely. He also pointed to the system’s smaller footprint and lower acquisition cost as factors that should widen the pool of companies able to bring 3D printing in-house.

De Peña Hempel, working on the technical roadmap, said HP is already looking at what comes after the 1200 as well as the next generation of its larger 5600 production system, with in-process quality inspection and AI-driven part predictability among the priorities. He pointed to functionality already built into HP’s production printers, including a part report on the 5600 that analyzes machine telemetry after a job finishes to flag potential defects and a higher-resolution optical camera on the 1200 that HP intends to pair with machine learning models to monitor parts as they are built rather than only after the fact.

Both executives see artificial intelligence reshaping the business well beyond quality control. Monino pointed to HP’s CADdo software for tolerance management and to AI-assisted design tools that have cut part design time from hours to minutes, alongside new dual-tone customization features that let customers apply graphics, QR codes or text to parts from a simple prompt. Asked whether HP might revive full-color 3D printing, which the company shelved after judging the market was not ready, Monino said the underlying inkjet technology and color pipeline remain intact and ready if demand materializes, though HP has no near-term plans to bring it back.

On the rise of desktop 3D printing brands like Bambu Lab, Monino said HP views the trend positively rather than as direct competition, given the two companies’ different positioning. “We’ve basically made the choice to focus on production… in industrial production, with that positioning, I only see it as an advantage because it’s going to broaden the availability of people knowing about, being aware of and knowing about 3D printing,” he said, adding that the calculation would change only if a company like Bambu Lab decided to move into industrial manufacturing itself.