On a different note: a friend of mine published on his blog this week that 3D printing is on the cusp of its "Windows 95" moment. It won't be long now before 3D printers get lower in price for higher end resolution. Instead of paying someone for a kit, we'll just purchase the STL file and print it out our selves. I remember reading that this is how it would turn out in a model railroading magazine in the late 90's, and we're almost there.
No.
Quality isn't really an issue, and prices for printers aren't far off from a decent airbrush. But we're a long, long way off from printing your own model kit. Usability has a long way to come - it's a messy, smelly, dirty, slow process that seems to be beyond a lot of users - 3D printers are still very much tools, not appliances you can just plug in and use. And most modellers don't and won't want to deal with the hassle.
But far more than the machines, there's essentially no way to handle the software side. There are few sites that distribute files for free, and some people trying to sell files with various degrees of success, but basically no real established way to distribute files to customers and, most importantly, ZERO DRM to combat piracy when you do. So the few places attempting to commercialize files get widely ripped off with files posted for free elsewhere, and are ridden with people who themselves are ripping off other artist's (free) works and attempting to charge for them. I do a lot of CAD for scale modelling and I'd never even dream of selling my files, because you pretty much have to assume that while you may sell the first one, every subsequent print you see will be pirated for free. And there's zero way to combat it, and almost no interest among the community to combat it - quite the opposite, the 'open source' nature of the 3D printing community means a lot of people would actively complain if it became more commercialized.
