I miss 3D printing at CES

by

Not too long ago, for me, the first week of January meant swapping the sad, fairy light glow of the post-Christmas blues for the bright lights of Las Vegas. The TCT team would do its post-Holiday pleasantries, still bleary-eyed and full from Quality Street, in the departures lounge at Manchester Airport before hopping on two or three planes and diving head first into the latest 3D printing technologies at CES - a similar shock to the senses as that of an early morning cold water swim.

CES, once an abbreviation for the Consumer Electronics Show, is one of the world’s foremost technology trade events, and for a while, 3D printing was a big part of it. Anyone who was anyone would be there, from known industry names like MakerBot and Materialise, to household brands like Polaroid who used the event to launch their forays into the 3D space. It’s where will.i.am was unveiled as 3D Systems’ Chief Creative Officer, where Stevie Wonder stopped by for a quick play on a 3D printed ukulele, and if you were new to the sector, the former 3D Printing TechZone, then sponsored by TCT, was the place you’d want to show your products amongst the Sonys and Samsungs of the world.

The 3D printing presence at CES today is very different to what is was a decade ago, back when TCT’s inaugural 3D Printing Conference at CES caused a line to snake around the corridors of the Las Vegas Convention Center, ultimately seeing the conference upgraded to a new location to accommodate double its planned audience capacity. Just as CES itself has evolved to reflect the shifts in the technologies it platforms each year, the 3D printing industry has undergone a similar evolution, from the halcyon days of ‘a 3D printer in every home’ to today’s CES show floor where the number of exhibiting companies focused specifically on 3D printing products can be counted on two hands, as companies focus more on industrial use cases under the preferred guise of 'additive manufacturing.'

This shift, however, is a positive one. The 3D printing industry has moved away from racing to price a printer at less than that of a games console, and onto applications that, though less enticing to the average consumer, are having a real impact on the manufacturing floor. Though, I have to admit, as my social feeds are filled with CES-tagged videos of animal robots, home appliances with fancy screens, and various things ‘powered by artificial intelligence,’ I kind of miss the buzz of it all. I miss when it was normal for a company to launch eight 3D printers in one go, when newcomers would go big on the superlatives and introduce ‘the fastest 3D printer ever,’ and when 3D printing pens seemed cute. That’s not to suggest 3D printing at CES was frivolous. Yes, there were plenty of knick-knacks and start-ups that never quite made it - that was true of any 3D printing event at the time - but it was also where people came to hear about the possibilities of printing in zero gravity from Made in Space, and where HP and Carbon gave some of the first showings of their respective, and now widely adopted, Multi Jet Fusion and CLIP technologies.

Get your FREE print subscription to TCT Magazine.

Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.

The role of 3D printing at CES these days, seemingly, is more application focused. Last year, Lenovo’s booth featured 3D printed furniture made using waste electronics by Dutch architectural firm Aectual, and HP’s HyperX gaming peripherals segment is once again showing customised gaming gear, which can be personalised with 3D printed add-ons.

When Formlabs, one of the 3D printing vendors exhibiting this year, launched its Form 3+ and Form 3B+ printers at CES back in 2022, Matt Lewis, Product Marketing Manager at Formlabs, told TCT, “Formlabs 3D printers are used by many of the inventors, engineers, and innovators who create new consumer products that are introduced at CES.” It echoed comments made by Formlabs CEO Max Lobovsky in 2019, who claimed that of the more than 4,000 CES exhibitors at CES that year, "3D printing was likely part of the ideation, development or manufacturing for more than 90% of them.”

CES is also as much a place to show next generation concepts as it is about devices you might walk into a store and buy tomorrow. CES 2016 was where I first saw an early iteration of 3D Systems’ high-speed Figure 4 technology, described at the time as "just a demo of some new technology we’ve got coming,” but now very much a flagship product for the printing pioneer that’s spawned applications everywhere from automotive to jewellery.

But we’ve always kind of known that 3D printing’s impact would be felt most in its use cases rather than the technology itself. One of the most referenced talks from the 3D Printing Conference at CES came in 2015 from industry consultant Phil Reeves, not about a 3D printing technology, but a breakdown of all of the 3D printable parts inside a washing machine. It makes sense then that amongst desktop printing companies like Creality, which according to figures from CONTEXT, continued to 'crush' the competition with machine shipments accounting for 47% of all shipped in its price class during Q2-24, exhibitors tagged with '3D printing' at CES 2025 include additive users like Lincoln Electric, a U.S. manufacturer, which last year notably deployed its large-scale metal AM technology to make parts for the US Navy and US Army Corps. 

Last summer, I spoke to a number of additive manufacturing executives during a panel session at RAPID + TCT who agreed that one of the drawbacks of the 3D printing industry was its insistence on labelling itself an industry. Rather, they suggested, 3D printing is just an enabling manufacturing technology, ‘another tool in the toolbox,’ for many sectors, whether that’s consumer products or defence. Therefore, if you’re making machines used by the aerospace industry, you’re in the aerospace industry. If it's medical applications, you’re in healthcare.

In my ten years of reporting on additive manufacturing, I’ve come to learn that the greatest marker of this industry's success is when the technology or process isn’t the story at all. In fact, on my last trip to Las Vegas back in May, Tony Hemmelgarn, President and Chief Executive Officer at Siemens Digital Industries Software, which is exhibiting at CES this week, suggested that AM had been “way overhyped” but added that just because it’s not the ‘in’ thing anymore (that spotlight belongs to AI, for the moment), for Siemens' customers “AM is making a tremendous difference.” Yes, it makes my job harder, but it also means that we’ve moved past the hype that used to swell around CES week, and are focusing more on what the technology can achieve, improve and optimise, which is really all manufacturers care about.

Even without a dedicated zone or conference this year, I fully expect 3D printing will be everywhere at CES 2025, just not in the ways we found it circa 2014. It was probably used to prototype those aforementioned robots, or make the tooling for some of those home appliances, or completely manufacture some as yet to be announced end-use product.

Am I sad to not be in Las Vegas this week, feeling the rush of cornering people for interviews, and being a part of the world's biggest tech gathering? Of course. But I’m also glad to see that the technology hype cycle is kind of doing its job. It’s been a tricky few years for the 3D printing industry, with scale backs and consolidation, the impact of which is sure to be felt throughout the next 12 months, and while my inbox isn't what it used to be at this time of year (it's actually pretty nice), I'll be viewing this week's launches and announcements through my additive lens to see where the technology is really making an impact on consumer-facing applications, and where we might want to pay more attention throughout the rest of the year.

Have you entered this year's TCT Awards? Submissions for the 2025 edition of the industry's annual celebration of 3D printing and additive manufacturing excellence are open until January 22nd. To find out more and enter your AM technology or application, visit tctawards.com.