The 7-year-old was lost in his iPad. I get it, the virtual world of Minecraft is cool. But then I showed him an app that lets him design a monster—and bring it to life with a 3-D printer.
Generation Touchscreen, meet your Easy-Bake Oven.
When I first reviewed a home 3-D printer two years ago, it cost nearly $1,400. Now my gadget lab has printers from New Matter, Printrbot and XYZPrinting that each cost $400. Makers of 3-D printers are targeting families, schools and scout troops with junior versions of machines pros use to melt plastic into prototypes. Even Mattel is joining that race with Thingmaker Design—that free creature-design app—and a $300 printer of its own due in the fall.
Complex technology, molten plastic and children. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, actually. Over a few weeks of testing, I managed to break each of my test printers at least once. They've oozed out sculptural abominations and giant wads of plastic spaghetti. I've become an expert at picking plastic out of searing-hot nozzles.
But that is also all part of the fun. Any parent interested in bringing a 3-D printer home should do it with the spirit of exploration, where the frustration is part of the education. Sure, 3-D printers have made a quantum leap in accessibility, but they're still slow, erratic contraptions—think drunk robot with a hot-glue gun—susceptible to vibration, temperature change and humidity.
The printer that I recommend for your first foray into 3-D is the $399 New Matter MOD-t. With a simple Web interface and IKEA design, it isn't just the easiest and prettiest. It will get your family into the least trouble—and with the best phone tech support, it'll get you back out of trouble quickly, too.
The one I'd get for myself, now that I've spent a few weeks learning its not-terribly-intuitive software, is the $399 Printrbot Play. It offers better print quality and more manual control. The $399 da Vinci Jr. 1.0w comes with beginner-friendly 3-D modeling tools, but requires you purchase pricey printing supplies from its maker, XYZPrinting.
The hype around home 3-D printers a few years ago was that we'd keep one around the house so we could print things instead of buying them. But most of just can't think of enough plastic things to print to justify buying one. Children have endless imaginations—and plenty of use for art projects and tchotchkes.
I made 3-D printed functioning gear machines I found on Thingiverse (a free Web store), a ferocious dinosaur-bird toy from ThingMaker, a nametag for a dog and a sculpture of Nefertiti from a faraway museum. Forget the lemonade stand, just imagine some enterprising tots cashing in on a custom-printed iPhone case business.
The projects can get way more advanced. I took inspiration from my colleague Jon Keegan, an artist who 3-D scans his children and prints them into sculptures .
With these $400 machines, we're not talking fine art. All they can print is plastic. Known as PLA, it is the same rigid, lightweight plastic you find in cutting boards. Made mostly of corn, it is nontoxic and smells a little bit like pancakes when it prints. PLA comes in spools, called filament, that the printer melts by heating up to 410 degrees Fahrenheit. It is deposited on a plate layer by layer, just one color at a time.
The filament is a 3-D printer's hidden cost. You can buy it online for as little as $24 per kilogram, enough to print nearly 400 chess pieces or 15 of my little Nefertitis. Both the MOD-t and Play can use PLA purchased anywhere, but the da Vinci Jr. has a sensor in its spool that requires you to use only XYZ's filament—at $47 a kilogram.
The first frustration is getting the filament into the printer. The MOD-t uses gears to pull the filament through a guide tube. That works—unless the filament breaks or gets jammed inside, which happened to me twice. The da Vinci's system was harder to set up initially, then worked with minimal intervention. On the Play you just manually jam in filament to a metal contraption while it is hot. It feels wrong but worked every time.
These 3-D printers are more affordable, in part, because manufacturers figured out how to make them work with fewer moving parts. The MOD-t has the most novel design: The print head that spits out molten plastic only goes up and down, while the plate your design materializes on is what moves around, so the plastic lands in exactly the right spot.
The simpler approach extends to the MOD-t's software. You use a Mac or PC app to set it up, but most of the action happens on your computer's Web browser, through the New Matter website. You can print designs from its store (mostly free, though some cost a few bucks) or upload designs to your New Matter account. You can't do much to customize designs there, but that's the idea—it simply beams your print job to the MOD-t over Wi-Fi. The printing starts when you press the machine's one and only button.
The MOD-t got poor reviews from its first customers, people who had backed a pre-sale campaign to create the printer. But the company says it has fixed its Wi-Fi problems, among other complaints. Out of my three dozen print tests, the moving-plate design slipped on several occasions, causing printing errors. Once, it got stuck and started oozing molten plastic all over.
The Play's advantages—and challenges—stem from the fact that Printrbot doesn't have its own software. It uses Cura, a program made by pro 3-D printer firm Ultimaker. My first few days of learning Cura were terrifying. But after a phone chat with Printrbot's founder, I came to understand and then love Cura's powerful tools. You can combine multiple designs into one print and set precise criteria—neither of which are possible with New Matter software. (MOD-t users who outgrow the New Matter website can download a free version of the Cura software to use with the printer.)
The Play doesn't have Wi-Fi, however, so you have to keep it attached to a computer or carry print files over on a MicroSD card.
The da Vinci's software lands somewhere in between, combining refined versions of some of Cura's quirks with Wi-Fi printing.
The proof is in the printout. The best and fastest printouts usually came out of the Play, which offers an extra-fine resolution. The MOD-t's prints were good; the XYZ's were often slow and sometimes inferior, though it could produce much larger objects.
Alas, none of them passed the Lego test. The resolution isn't nearly precise enough to print studs with the "clutch power" that allows the famous bricks to hold together.
And no printer was reliable enough to just set and forget. Something would go wrong in one out of four jobs—most commonly, the first few layers wouldn't adhere properly, causing the thing to start spitting plastic. That hot nozzle is enough for me to be extra vigilant. I set up a webcam to monitor the printers just in case.
These inevitable problems are also why tech support is crucial. Pioneers of 3-D printing have created vast online communities with tips and tricks, but newcomers may just feel better with a number to call. New Matter offers that, and proved quite helpful when I called. XYZ also has a support line, but wasn't able to fix my problem in the first call. Printrbot offers just email and online group support.
It is unusual to find a technology as simultaneously fun and nerve-racking as 3-D printing. That is why I'd count it more as a hobby than a tool today. Still, I have no doubt there is a generation to come who will take for granted that one way to get a new toy is to just press "print."
Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com
