Consumer Printers
Soon after, the massive expansion of 3D printer accessibility with these new companies would occur. The average consumer wasn't willing to buy a 3D printer since it would be around $1000 for a reliable and big build volume printer. The alternative is that you'd have to buy a smaller printer that could only print small sizable objects, and there wasn't a niche in between these two extremes in the market.
Eventually, companies such as Creality and more Chinese manufacturers began to further cheapen the cost of 3D printing into sub-$1000 printers with cheaper manufacturing, of course. Creality would soon release the Ender 3 printer, and it was an extremely cheap 3D printer that was approximately $200 or $100 (at Microcenter). It had a very respectable build volume of 220 x 220 x 250 mm and well-made parts with an aluminum frame (previously printers at this price were made out of plastic). However, the Ender 3 had many corners cut for costs and required a lot of tinkering to utilize due to its cheap design. Yet, this 3D printer heavily decreased the barrier to entry with low costs and good hardware. This printer would be the unofficial gateway 3D printer for hobbyists and consumers. Post-Ender 3, cheap 3D printers would be more reliable with further iterations by other companies, and they created better specced printers at the same price point later (mostly based on Ender 3 like design).
On the more expensive end of 3D printers, companies such as Bambu Labs innovated by specializing in mid-cost 3D printers that were extremely reliable and essentially removed the technical aspect of entry. They didn’t require a lot of tinkering and beat the costs and hardware of competitors with massive success. Bambu would push other higher-end printer companies like Prusa to finally start innovating again to stay competitive.
Innovative Present
PS: This gets more technical.
With a larger market, larger innovations would follow in the 3D printing industry. New types of printing, such as SLA, began to popularize which utilized UV and resin to create hardened objects with cured resin. These SLA printers were only a couple of hundred dollars on release, similar to the Ender 3, but had extremely high print quality with UV lasers having high precision and accuracy at the cost of a smaller build volume.
Other than the original CoreXY introduced by Darwin and Cartesian designs, there are more designs for FDM printers. Delta printers have gained popularity around the mid-2010s since they use Cartesian coordinates but work extremely differently, as they have three z-axes to control the y-axis and x-axis by changing the z-axis heights. Some more obscure printers are being developed or have already developed. For instance, the belt printer is a relatively new innovation that was pioneered by the White Knight 3D printer. This printer has a theoretically infinite y-axis since it prints on essentially a conveyor belt and allows for extremely long items like chains and swords to be printed continuously and infinitely as the print gets pushed in one direction. There are some other printers such as SCARA and polar printers that exist too, but they are relatively unpopular and obscure so I will not explain them.
Another newly obscure printer is the infinite z-axis printer. There is exactly one singular printer of this type dubbed “Infini-Z” printer. This printer has an infinite z-axis as it is able to 3D print on top of its own z-axis rail for a theoretically continuous height as its 3D printer assembly rises. Now unlike the belt printer, the main purpose of this printer is that it allows for itself to fully replicate its own parts. This is not like RepRap since it can print its entire frame because of this infinite z-axis. This printer is obviously experimental, but still a cool innovation that essentially summarizes the 3D printing mindset: we do things because we can.
Material innovations also occurred with the rise of consumer printers. Most filaments utilize previously existing plastics, but have additives to improve printing quality or change material properties and colors. For instance, many metal, marble, carbon fiber, and even wood filaments exist. They combine usually PLA with the grounded up powdered versions of these materials like grounded up sand or metal. These metal composites, for instance, could be used to conduct electricity (albeit not great). Carbon fiber composites could provide rigid and strong parts.
Sometimes new filaments are simply just existing plastics but adapted for use in printers. TPU is a relatively newly used filament that is bendy and soft, and is great for vibration dampening but requires some hardware modifications. PETG is also a new and popular filament that is a sort of plastic cousin of PET, which is commonly used in water bottles. ASA is a new popular alternative to ABS since it is easier to use, which is the "oldest" filament used by 3d printers and requires a lot of heat to print properly. Material innovations have allowed for a wide variety of filament types with different properties to be utilized in consumer 3D printers. These new filaments are often paired with multi-material printers. This type of printing allows the user to print multiple types of plastics and colors all at once.
Metal 3D printing began to innovate too. Although metal printers are still relatively expensive and require a lot of technical expertise similar to the pre-RepRap era, they have dropped significantly in cost in this time and changed massively in design. The main issue with metal printing is the high temperature needed and the massive warping issues compared to plastic 3D printers. Warping occurs as heat expands the metal temporarily, and then cools down, shrinking and warping the print.
Credit to Nathan Shows and Andrew Wu