The article slants like stereolithography is a difficult to achieve ("magical") tech and these guys are pioneering some new kind of revolutionary product but I'm pretty sure outfits like Formlabs were doing this years ago (and now many others; see kickstarter). I didn't see it on my skim through but have they developed some revolutionary improvement to the old UV developer resin and projector technique?

See http://carbon3d.com/ for the slick presentation and http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6228/1349.abstract for the juicy details.

The main innovation is allowing curing whilst submerged by using an oxygen permeable membrane. This allows continuous curing, which creates really high quality plastics - supposedly equivalent to injection moulds, really high resolution models - high enough to generate smooth slants, and really fast print times - over an order of magnitude improvement.

The two current biggest issues with thermoplastic 3D printers are:

- electricity usage: heating a baseplate, feed head and mechanical effort of moving a massive apparatus bazillion^3 times.

- speed (or lack thereof) of moving one or two heads those bz^3 times to get anything made

We're still in the "horse-and-buggy"-days of distributed manufacturing, so one approach or another will eventually find something scalable, Edison-style. More inventions and approaches are definitely a good-thing.

This isn't a thermoplastic printer?

Read the article: looks like a light-curing printer, which prints 2 dimensions at a time instead of 1.

I did read the article. I'm just confused about what the GGP comment about thermoplastic printers was about for an article that isn't about thermoplastic printers.