We are a long, long way off home 3D printing supplanting purchasing miniatures. The technology, although not prohibitively expensive is still not “plug and play” anf it also carries some additional overheads, especially resin printers that require a lot of cleanup and generally speaking involves handing and use of some fairly nasty substances.    In order to become the default way of buying miniatures it needs to be more convenient than buying them.  Therefor I propose that 3D printing needs to achieve the following standard before it stands a chance of being the goto way of obtaining miniatures:

1) You supply the files to the printer directly from a computer without needing to do any prep work

2) Every file must print first time nearly every time

3) Miniatures must have zero post print cleanup, or if they have any it must be minimal and be achievable with easy to obtain substances

4) The unit must require minimal upkeep in terms of print medium and cleaning

Whilst the technology is generally getting better there aren’t actually that many additional uses for home 3D printing beyond miniatures so there isn’t a great deal of commercial incentive in undertaking the R&D required to achieve the standard I described above.   I am not saying it will never get there at all but that journey will be slow because of the lack of other uses for the technology.

There are a few other issues that I also think need to be overcome, such as the quality of the resin itself. A 1kg bottle of standard Elegoo Grey is £40 here in the UK. That £40 doesn’t really go as far as you might think, especially if you get a few failures. It really starts to get pricey if you want to print anything sizeable.  I recently printed a tank from Antenociti’s workshop that used the best part of half a bottle, so that cost about £20, which is not a noticeable saving over buying a resin cast vehicle of a similar size. The resin is also incredibly brittle and small components such as swords and spears are liable to snap even under gentle pressure such as a paint brush.  I have seen reviews of other resins that have more flex in them and so are more robust however they’re also almost twice the price

Don’t get me wrong, IFL my resin printer and as someone who loves Cyberpunk, it has really enabled that genre of miniatures in a big, big way. I don’t think I could go back to not having one. However I cannot honestly say that 3D printing is an easy process. It’s quite labour intensive and messy.