Now the world's largest envelope manufacturer--it cranked out 37 billion last year--and fourth-largest commercial printer, Mail-Well offers a glimpse into an industry consolidation gone awry.
Rounding out the bunch is the Photosmart 375 Compact Photo Printer, which is a portable model meant for cranking out 4-by-6-inch prints while on the go.
Xerox figured out how to let everyone be a one-button printer, and killed the small printing press manufacturers.
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But for those not yet willing to shell out thousands of dollars for their own home 3D-printer, Shapeways offers another path to bring software models into reality, asking consumers and retailers to upload their designs shipping the results back to them, printed on high-end machines with a level of precision and in materials that no consumer 3D printer can yet achieve.
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Run an unfamiliar tool under an end-of-aisle scanner, and a printer would spit out a page showing how to use it.
What makes this a medical feat straight out of science fiction: The splint was created on a three-dimensional printer.
But no matter how much energy you put into building a sandcastle, it's unlikely to be as impressive as the structures produced by Stone Spray, a solar-powered, robotic 3D printer that can create entire buildings out of sand.
The printer pulls images from any Bluetooth-enabled camera and churns out color photos in less than 60 seconds.
They called their local screen printer only to find out that they needed to know exactly how many T-shirts and what sizes would be needed.
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The 3-D printer maker Stratasys went so far as to seize a 3-D printer it had rented to the gunsmiths at Defense Distributed when it found out how they were planning it use it.
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The hard work at the Eindhoven-based company is carried out by an old industrial robot that Vander Kooij fashioned into a 3D printer.
The Shells are constructed out of ABS -- the same plastic used to create Lego -- which is fed into the printer from a spool.
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PC, tagged images are automatically e-mailed to a list of recipients, posted on a web page, printed out on an inkjet printer, or sent over the Internet to a photo finisher to be printed.
This T-shirt had a certain factual, hyperbole-denied charm one could imagine its scrupulous screen-printer, one eye turned to the AL East standings, taking a red pen and crossing out BATTLE, CONFLICT, SHOWDOWN, CLASH, and even FACE OFF.
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