The very real market for these machines is with engineers, students, and hobbyists. These machines are essential to give a very useful, hands on, introduction to additive manufacturing. There are and will be people that use the low priced plastic machines in innovative ways but they are far from being in every household. The machines themselves are only part of the manufacturing equation. The software is critical in the design and setup for each build. It's harder than it looks if you're doing more than downloading a file from thingiverse and pumping it right into the printer.
"While not quite yet resonating with general consumers, Desktop 3D Printers remain an important gateway technology for the evolution of the 3D Printing industry" noted Chris Connery, VP for Global Analysis at CONTEXT. "Today's young engineers, students, and hobbyists need to become exposed to the concepts necessary to allow them to properly design products for an additive manufacturing environment and low cost, entry level Personal 3D Printers allow for this learning to take place more rapidly."
There are also a couple of figures that present data on Global Industrial/Professional machine sales.
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