3D printing is all the rage. Consumer equipment aside, the manufacturing concerns have embraced 3D printing. 3D printer accuracy is getting better everyday. There is, however, an issue.
Assuming you are in the 3D printing for creating an iterative process, or reverse engineering (as opposed to just printing instead of casting parts you designed from the ground up) you can only print to the quality of the data you have. Voxeljet had this in one of there puff pieces about a ...um... 'pipe' that was artful and reproduced via their technology: "The customer was pleased at how quickly and accurately the voxeljet machine was able to print even the smallest details such as the minuscule frog motifs on the pipe." Art may be reproducible to a degree, but that would not have been doable with, say, a gear reducer.
High quality 3D printing requires high quality 3D data. You aren't going to get that with the laser scanners that are being offered as a solution.
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