Hold on to your hats, it’s time for another 3D Hubs Trend Report. If you’re not in the know, the 3D Hubs Trend Report is put together every three months using data from 6,000 active international service providers.
These providers fabricate over 200,000 3D printed parts every quarter and the quality of the prints is reviewed by customers. As a result, 3D Hubs has an overview of new trends in the 3D printing world.
Still, the 3D Hubs trend reports has changed significantly. With 3D Hubs heading more toward professional 3D printing and less towards a maker’s manufacturing network, the categories have changed drastically – the most popular consumer 3D printers aren’t showing up anymore (but we’ve got you covered here). The 3D Hubs report now offers insights about their most popular industrial and desktop 3D printers, geography, tech and materials, and – for the first time – CNC machining.
3D Hubs Communications Manager, George Fisher-Wilson, explains in a press release: “Spring has brought about some drastic changes to the data. This is in part due to the beginning of a new financial year and the end of the academic year. The impact of adding 19 new materials to our CNC machining service can already be seen below!”
And The Highest Ratings for 3D Printing Go To…
When it comes to the Most Used Machine category, the Form 2 printed 14,517 parts in Q2. Interestingly, the Most Used Color for 3D printing is black. This color makes up 45% of the FDM color distribution which means nearly half of 3D prints are black.
Taking the lead as the Highest Rated Desktop Printer is the Zortrax M200. At #1 place, it has a printer quality rating of 4.87 out of 5. Coming in at second place is The Lulzbot Taz 5.
For the Highest Rated Industrial Printers, the Formiga P 100 takes first place with the HP Jet Fusion 3D 4200 following behind for the second time in 2018. Fisher-Wilson explains, “HP grows from strength to strength… The machine’s output also saw growth for the third quarter, up 30% from 5,000 to 6,500 prints made.”
Finally, it’s believed that the Top Print Cities and Top Print Countries were impacted by the student peak in line with the beginning of the new financial year.
Both New York, USA and London, UK grew substantially thanks to the high number of universities bumping up the market share. In fact, for New York and London, they saw their market share increase by 30%.
Read the full 3D Hubs Trend Report for further insights and find previous quarter reports, here.
License: The text of "3D Hubs Releases Digital Manufacturing Trend Report for Q3 2018" by All3DP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.