Polaroid’s PlaySmart 3D printer is cheap, compact and coming soon

3D printing has been “a thing” for years now – but generally only for those lucky tech-heads with the necessary space and big pots of cash to splash. Polaroid’s upcoming PlaySmart 3D printer (€449, available 1st March 2019) wants to change all that: weighing just 5kg and small enough to perch on your desktop, it can conjure up 3D prints up to 120 x 120 x 120mm in size, in multiple colours and with layer heights from 50 to 300 microns. It even features a built-in video camera that captures all its prints for posterity and, thanks to a Wi-Fi hook-up, will even beam a live feed of in-progress jobs to your smartphone. As for those all-important 3D print recipes, you can import and edit .stl files using Polaroid’s SmartPrep software platform, which comes with thousands of pre-loaded files, and will tell you exactly how long and how much material each print requires.