It is. I had one on my desk for about a month and was too slow in realizing it's awesomeness - I wanted to print out a complete Settlers of Catan, but found out Id be running the printer for a little over 50 hours with a lot of setting up. Saw a nice one at CES retailing for "only" $1200 - still too much for what would basically be a toy, but soon...
Oh, they do... but they're still $100K and up. You could order your Orc printed in pure gold from Shapeways or some outfit...
I know plenty of people who've gone the Shapeways route for Epic: Armageddon models. Some of them are fucking superb. I have some 6mm Necron Monoliths and Chaos Defilers that GW never did, that look amazing.
Sure, and that was my point. Shapeways uses printers/laser sintering machines in the $200K and up range, so they can produce awesomely detailed models in a variety of materials - and using their services for that one off centerpiece figure in your army makes some sense... but printing infantry is probably still a bit too expensive for the average gamer.
What materials *can* you use? Could I empty a bag of powdered teeth into the thing and print with that? Metal?
Speaking of 3d printing: Smithsonian is scanning their collection to be reproduced by 3d printing technology. So cool!
Imagine when we can print 3d superstructures out of carbon nanotubes, and then when that technology becomes sufficiently cheap and miniaturized...
