Sometimes FDM printing won't cut it. Maybe you have one; these are the printers with the spool of filament that feeds through a hot nozzle. For finer layers and different materials sometimes it makes sense to turn to a different process. (to skip the words and see prices, scroll down)
I designed an adapter for a small home appliance. The production part will be injection molded, and we needed some prototypes to test the function and appearance before going to tooling. We sent the CAD out for quote with several different 3D printing processes in mind. An SLS part would provide the most durable prototype and for that reason was the best stand-in for an actual production part. So, we made one by SLS. However, we also needed an appearance model. SLS parts always tend to retain their rough sandy look and paint does nothing to improve the matter. So, we quoted SLA and polyjet. Both of these can be sanded and painted to a very nice surface finish, but in this particular case, I was concerned that the screw bosses would crack (and they did.)
We ended up going with polyjet because we were able to print it in a grey color that closely matched the rest of the product. A sanded and painted finish in either polyjet or SLA would have looked better, but would have also cost more. 3D print build prices are usually related to the material volume. This part was basically a hollow shape, 13.5 x .75 x 4 inches and with .079 thick walls (342 x 19 x 100 mm, 2mm thick.) The quotes varied considerably, by both vendor and process:
Polyjet $572
SLS $220
SLA, vendor 1 $420
SLA, vendor 2 $189
3D printing can be cheap, especially if you do it on your own machine. But sometimes it makes sense to shell out the big bucks for a particular material or process from a professional service bureau.
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