Any question answered...

What are you going to print?

Would that give the game away?

No idea yet, bits and pieces here and there. I'm thinking of doing my major project at uni on open source manufacturing next year at uni though so having a 3d printer now and getting involved in what's happening would be good anyway.

The risk is that you shell out, then 3d printers suddenly get cheaper/better and you can no-longer demand £15 per print.

The risk of not doing it is that you don't get a printer to play with, don't get to meet the interesting people who would want to use it, don't get the experience of trying to make it pay for itself, and time passes you by.

What sort of printer are you looking at?

They have just got suddenly cheaper (25k down to 1k) but this is only because of the DIY/hack community. It's still in its infancy at the moment and takes a certain amount of nerdyness to get involved with. I take your point about it becoming more common though.

The printer in question is the latest one from hackerbot

that will be my fear, if this are like DVD or Blue Rays or CDs (back in the days) every 4 months they will lose 15% until it reach a price everybody can afford

This won't happen for a long time, the price won't drop significantly anymore and I can't see them ever becoming household objects (although it would be fucking rad if they were). It's a pretty specialist bit of kit and has only just started to become accessible to 'normal' people and hobbyists but it will never be a standard office gadget.

Thanks for the questions though everyone, given me some stuff to start thinking about. Turns out my mum did a business diploma in her past and has given me a shit load of things to find out.