Those helmets will be, maybe 50% cheaper for the consumer? - just a random figure. Come on, you’re just talking nonsense now.
Yes, this is gunning to happen in my country 
I live in India
The products - if there were 100 million people in line to buy a helmet, a normal one the you can get now, the maker would have sold 100 million helmets. NOW, ten modellers come along who can each make a SEPARATE design - there’s still only a 100 million people! THAT no. hasn’t gone up. So now that helmet revenue will be divided by TEN modeller+printer combinations, instead of ONE guy or company getting all of it. Not equally, of course - 9 million folks will like Design A, another 13 million will go for Design B, and so on.
The CONSUMER now has a choice of 10 helmet models - he’s very happy! 
WE unfortunately, are left in the ditch (well, each of those 10 modellers make something, obviously!).
yes, but like i said only about 50% of my income comes from 3d-printing at the moment. i find it safer (and also more fun) to diversify a bit.
people in average households would be extremely disappointed by the printing speed and quality and printer handling. even those high end printers at places like shapeways… have you seen what the process is like and what a mess this is? toxic resin slime, powder, curing ovens, coloring baths, polishing machines,…
why are we in the ditch? who is we? i don’t quite understand your examples.
3d printing makes most sense for customized products, prototyping, shapes that are impossible otherwise,… there are enough possibilities to make money…
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A million copies??? lmao. Nope not with 3D printing… 3D printing has nothing do to with volume production as a viable business… its completely economically nonviable for volume production of anything.
Remember those plastic toy soldiers or action figures from china you had as a kid in the 50s 60s 70s 80s?? they cost less than a penny to make, practically nothing, and every kid has them, thats billions of the things.
Making those things in the millions with 3D printers rather than injection molding would be akin to making T-shirts out of hand woven spider silk, or making cars out of gold. Or making coffee mugs by taking clay to the international space station having the astronauts mould the clay during a space walk and then fire it in the engine nozzle during a docking maneuver then bringing a batch home to earth every few months in a Soyuz capsule.
If you want to make many of a product for profit its Chinese economies of scale, slave labor and injection molding or vacuum forming.
If you want to make cool expensive prototypes or novelty objects to sell to people who are willing to pay exuberant prices to cover your costs and make you a profit, or make prototypes for a new product then that is where you would use 3D printing.
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The modelling public of BlenderArtists
it’s quite simple. if you would like to make money with modeling you have to find someone who is willing to pay you for it. 
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This is an old thread (ITS ALIVE!!! ), but now might be a good time to resurrect it. I just purchased two 3d printers, an FDM (Creality CR-10 V3) and a resin printer (Elegoo Mars 3). They are a lot of fun, and have their good and bad sides, but they do work for many things. The printers are so much more affordable than they were when the OP started this thread. I paid about $700 for both of them. I wanted a large volume FDM printer, so that pushed the cost up, but there are cheaper options out there.
There is one example of where a 3d printer is able to totally eclipse the competition, and that would table top gaming (Warhammer, etc.) The cost for gaming models has gone through the roof where some models can run you $100 to $1000 each, and you still have to build and paint it. If you have a good STL file and good settings on the printer, you can print the same models from $1 to $40 each in supplies and file costs. Of course this is after the cost of the printer. But each model you print after brings the cost down. The resin printers especially have gotten really high quality where you can print models that would not be possible with injection molding.
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I’ve had my eye on the Mars 3 for a while, can you tell me more about your experience with it?
It’s been a blast really, just to be able to print out models either by creating them in Blender or purchasing models online (which there are a huge amount of quality ones) is awesome. I have done three prints so far and they have all came out great with almost no issues. They do take awhile to print, mine were around 3 to 5 hours each depending on size. Actually it depends on how many layers your model was sliced into for resin printers. The Mars 3 does a slice every 2.5 seconds and each model was between 1600 to 2300 slices. I set each slice to be 30 microns thick, but you can thicken them to decrease the print time.
I did purchase the bundle with the printer, washing station, and the UV curing station all included. The stations help a lot with dealing with the resin, which is caustic and you don’t want to get it on your skin, etc. The smell of the resin is unpleasant but not as bad as I thought it would be given all of the opinions on line. I am going to upgrade the printer with a flexible magnetic build plate which should make getting the models off the plate much easier.
The minor problems I have had with it has to do with cleaning the uncured resin off of the print. You need to do a really good job otherwise you will get parts that look like they have melted. This is caused from some remaining uncured resin that is then cured when you put the model into the curing station. The other downside is that you need to take care of the resin mess and the cleaning solution (usually IPA). I take my paper towels and nitrile gloves and put them in the curing station before I can throw them away. Or you can set them outside in the sunlight to cure as well.
Hope that helps.
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I have seen in various videos that some people have a brand new washing device for doing this. Perhaps is a matter of temperature, duration, chemicals as such in order to get a result as best as possible in an easy way.
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I think the last cleaning I did, I set the machine to 10 min, but I still had some left over uncured resin. Next time I will put it in for 20 min. and see how that works. I have seen some people go after the prints with a toothbrush, but that seemed more messy to me? Also in my machine I have a mix of 75 percent IPA and 99 percent IPA which might affect the clean. It’s hard to find 99 percent IPA around here for some reason.
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There is always money if you are good enough. And good enough is multi-faceted. Good enough finish, good enough designs, good enough manufacturing, good enough painted models, …etc.
This sector is a little saturated thanks to all the free and paid models on-line but if you have your own designs that are unique enough to stand out from the crowd I am sure you can make money.
There are folks on the 3d forums I’m part of that always mention they are making money.
I got my FDM printer about 9 months ago and its been a total blast making my totally useless trinkets for my own entertainment. It’s been running almost constantly the entire time.
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Agreed 