The prototyper
When I was working for Oce's graphic arts software development the most dreadful thing was to test the idea. Any idea that we wanted to test required us to descend some floors in the print room and then prepare the huge Arizona XT printer. We started with the daily maintenance, cleaning the print heads, print a sheet for control then prepare the media, and start the printing from the files we have sent to the RIP software. I have failed quite often to print things correctly and thus I had to retry. With the print proofs,or complete print ready we were going back upstairs to correct the software.
It was tedious. We were using a giant printer to print in some situations a 30 by 30 centimeters board - or even less sometimes.
I started dreaming of a possible sleek white Oce branded desktop A4 UV printer that would save me the time and reduce the walking through the building in order to print something. Then I realised that that could have been a cool product for some freelance artists, small graphic art workshops or some boutique brands that could use something like this for very limited production runs. I guess that I spoke about this with some guys in the company explaining that this could have been marketed through Apple and Adobe channels for creative professionals but in the end nothing happened. In the meanwhile I have also changed the industry and didn't pay too much attention to this.
Yesterday, however, I was thinking how I could restore an old watch dial and I reached the conclusion that overprinting the destroyed part with an UV printer would create a perfect restoration. So I have started to search for a desktop UV printer and I found a product thet works as a perfect prototyper for my use case - EufyMaker (https://www.eufymake.com/).
My dream "prototyper" has just become real. I was thrilled!
It has all the flashy low relief printing (up to 5mm height) capabilities that also other more established producers have and the software is more than decent in my view. This small marvel could be used to print on any material and personalize day-to-day objects, create stickers, badges, bucles - or why not create nice DIY aviation gauges for one's basement flight simulator. Endless possibilities to prototype.
Coupling this with a small laser cutter/CNC, a 3d printer and a normal printer a lot of creative ideas might become real. For sure this is not a production tool and the price is not cheap but it offers a better bang for the buck than a Roland LEF with similar quality and features.
Here is a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IBMjZDMdcc