Zhuhai CTC Electronic has jumped into the 3D printing industry with a number of successful desktop FFF 3D printers, including the second highest rated on 3D Hubs. The company has taken the success of its FFF 3D printers seriously, launching new manufacturing facilities and making plans for producing a DLP 3D printer. Now, it looks as though the Chinese company has even more technologies up its sleeve, announcing plans to launch an inkjet-based 3D printer at next year’s CES in Las Vegas.
Jianru Tan, Vice President of Zhuhai CTC Electronic, revealed to Chinese 3D printing blog Maker8 that the company is now working “secretly” on an inkjet-based 3D printer to compete with the existing inkjet machines on the market, which currently include the PolyJet line from Stratasys and 3D Systems’ powder bed technology. In the future, category will also include HP’s Multi Jet Fusion technology. If CTC manages to release their own inkjet system, they will be the first company in China to do so.
Maker8 says that the printer, which will be a black cube with “curve[d] panels and stylis[h] lines”, has been in development with the University of London since last November. The site further states that the machine will fuse multicolored resin and powder with UV light. Beyond that, Tan did not elaborate much further, but based on this description, it sounds as though it may not be dissimilar from PolyJet technology, which also uses UV light.
For more information, we’ll have to wait until CES, but given the price of the company’s FFF machines, I think it might be fair to suggest that CTC will be able to undercut their competitors significantly, perhaps opening up full-color 3D printing tech to an even wider number of businesses.
