Early this morning I got an email from the folks over at Owl Works alerting me to the fact that their new Kickstarter project was just about to be launched. And, today, it’s just gone live, with the campaign page available for view here. While this is not usually a significant event – hell, let’s be honest, with the number of Kickstarter 3D printer projects out there, an email like this wouldn’t normally even get read – but this one…well, this one is a little different.
The Owl Works “Morpheus” printer represents something new, but more than that, something new that has already shown it can work… publicly. I first came across the Morpheus back in May, when Park SeongJin, known in the local Maker community as ‘LabC’, told me about this new project and that he was off to California with his team to attend the Display Week 2015 show in San Jose.
I next got a chance to actually see the Morpheus in the flesh at the Inside 3D Printing expo in Seoul this past June, and it was as impressive as LabC had said it was. The quality and size (especially the size) of the prints were amazing. It didn’t take long to figure that between the Morpheus, with its LCD/LED process (dubbed “LIPS”) allowing almost unlimited sized prints, and the specular speed of Carbon3D’s CLIP technology, that the “old” style SLA and DLP machines may be going the way of the dinosaurs.
Well, here we are now, after months of planning, prepping, testing, and designing, and Owl Works is ready to actually “take the plunge” and try to make a go of their idea. The Kickstarter site has a lot of information, and does a pretty good job of explaining the technology and even had a few surprises. One was that the team has made their build chamber even bigger that it already was! The machine I saw had a build chamber of 33cm x 18 cm x 20 cm, but the new one will allow you to create items that are 10cm taller! And while the Morpheus is rather large for a desktop machine, it still fits the description, but here’s the funny part: Its build chamber, at a whopping 33cm x 18cm x 30cm, is bigger than many other 3D printing machines! The Morpheus 3D printer can be purchased at the “Super Early Owl” price of $3,799, while the price goes up to $4,199 for the “Last Minute Owl” and it looks as though the mass manufactured units will price at around $4,699.
Whatever the outcome is, I am sure Owl Works will help push the technology forward whether they do it as an single independent company, or as part of a larger business. I say that knowing that if I was a large established AM company…I would be keeping a very close eye on this team.
