Never a dull month for 3D Hubs. Sure, desktop-based, distributed 3D printing is still a very young sector in a very young market and trends are bound to change drastically; however, the latest August Trend Report carries a long a number of significant changes in the global 3D Hubs scenario. The first and most noticeable is that 3D Hubs has now passed the 20,000 registered 3D printers mark.
This achievement is made more significant by the fact that, while it took 21 months to reach the 10,000 mark (in the beginning of 2015), it only took 6 months to reach 20,000 registered 3D printers. This means that the growth rate more than tripled for the second 10,000 3D printers. If the acceleration rate continued on these lines, the next 10,000 3D printers would only take roughly 2 months and the following only a couple of weeks.
Considering that these are not all of the 3D printers sold in the world, but only those that register to 3D Hubs (btw, it would be interesting to know what estimated percentage of all global 3D printers are present on 3D Hubs… I would guess it is around 5% of all desktop systems), this is good news for the entire industry.
The good news doesn’t end there. 3D Hubs’ Highest Rated 3D printers list is also quite dynamic with two new arrivals in the top spots: the Prusa Steel and the Rapide Lite 200. Of course the limited number of ratings (about 45 each) helps the new comers claim a top spot (as it happened for the Kossel XL). In this sense, the ranking of the Zortrax M200, in fourth place with 515 ratings, weighs more. It must be said that the competition is tight, with all top 20 performers spanning between 4.7 to 4.87 ratings out of 5.
Moving onto the Trending Printers, this past month has seen very significant news in this chart as well, mainly the grand return of the Ultimaker with its Ultimaker Extended model registering a 115% MoM growth. One more interesting element that emerges is that there are some 2,000 Ultimaker 3D printers registered on the 3D Hubs network. Second on this chart is the Micro 3D, which I failed to include in my Top 10 3D Printers Under $1,000 list (I did not know it was being delivered already), but should definitely have been there, since it is now retailing for just $349 and users seem to be quite happy with it.
One last very important development is that New York City’s registered Hubs are growing very fast and have now reached 320 users, distancing both runner ups Los Angeles and Milan (however Milan has about 1/6 as many inhabitants as NYC and LA). The distributed nature of the desktop 3D printing world continues to shine through with Canada (Toronto) making it into the Top 10 cities for the first time.
The rest of the charts don’t present particular revolutions compared to the previous months. You can view them all (as well as previous reports) on the official 3D Hubs Trend Reports page. As the number of Hubs continues to grow, more and more new trends will help us understand the industry’s evolution, but in the world of distributed manufacturing some things probably will never change: for example that this one is the Hub where I’d like to be.
