It was just an illustration, I wasn't meaning for you to go buy it. I don't know enough about phone prices to be able to say whether that's a normal price or not. I used it as an illustration because I have picked up plenty of smart phones on sale at Best Buy. Most recently the Moto E for about $20 on sale.
It's clever but so impractical for consumer use. You're going to put away your phone for a few hours while this prints and be OK with that?
And if you're going to have to buy another device just to use this in a practical way, why not already just include a cheap android wifi-only device into the base?
Other people are questioning the "visible light cure" resin. Assume that it exists and works fine, it's a bit of a handling hassle, as you need to treat it like unexposed photographic film. As soon as you open the lid to take your print out the unexposed resin in the bottom of the box is going to start curing.
Other SLA printers like the Form 1 and 2 from Formlabs also cure with (barely) visible light technically (405nm laser). It normally doesn't cure fast enough for the problem you describe to be a problem, though stray light will in general cure it over time.
I immediately looked into that as well, since I'm still waiting for mine to ship. It's about two years late, and all the delays seem to be due to the fairly standard Kickstarter stuff (inexperience, shocking misunderestimatings of manufacturing, typical defect and spec failures, etc.)
The really cool thing about the Peachy Printer is the mechanism for the laser and such - sophisticated results for just a few parts. And the super cool thing about the OP printer is how simple the mechanism is. I look forward to see which ideas win in the end (or at least for which types of products - some resins are certainly better than others).
In addition to what mankyd said, this printing method ties precision to the pixel density of the screen. Low resolution screens like the one you linked give lower quality prints. You would really need to step up to a higher-resolution small tablet or large phone (something like [1]) to get a package that works well for the average consumer. That's going to add at least $50 to the BOM and make overall development trickier.
They'd still need software to control said hardware. We can assume such software would be mobile, based on what they're currently offering.
Then they'd need a way to pair the phone with the controller, or otherwise get the data over. This complicates things for the owners. At that point, you might as well just use the phone itself.
Mind you that this limits the versatility of what they're selling - you can only print something as big as your phone - but they aren't aiming at the high-end market with this.
They mention that it works with larger screen sizes, but I wonder what kind of problems could appear at the smaller end.
The detail on some of those prints they're showing off in the pictures and video look decent though, none of those layered striations that you get with some of the more conventional printers? Can't really tell for sure though, not without some better pictures.
SLA printers (resin) print the models upside down. Thats because they pull up to break from the bottom container with the liquid, and lower back down to do the next layer.
Usually for post processing, you'll use a UV lightbox to cure the parts completely.
From the video it looks like it spends time hardening the layer closest to the phone's screen, then presumably, when that layer is sufficiently hard a mechanism pushes it up and begins working on the next layer.
It looks like in the video it has the phone underneath the resin and a platform that raises up from the resin so that it's printing in a top down manner.
Wait a minute, people doing this with projector where using DLP projectors, do you need a OLED smartphone then? Because as far as I know, most screen emit light on black. Or is it reactive to a specific color. I have some doubt about the quality of the printing.
How fast is this? I feel like leaving my smartphone on with its screen at its brightest setting (presumably) for hours at a time is a great way to burn out my phone.
Backlight won't be an issue. LEDs like that have service lifetimes longer than your own. The switching elements in the screen burning in is another issue, but it seems like burn-in on modern displays (AMOLED) is a reversible hysteresis effect that you can clear out by flipping the pixels to extreme values approximately.
If I were to use this myself, I would have no problem keeping my phone plugged in. I always have my laptop anyway, and if I'm at home I can just use a wall charger.
The underlying problem with this method is that the OLED screens put out almost 0 UV radiation.
UV is what the resins need to harden.
"Because of submitting too fast..."
REPLY:
Ok. I just came back from MRRF (Midwest RepRap Festival), and nothing came out about the accessibility of visible light cured resins.
It may be a cool lab invention right now, but if I cannot buy it in 200ml quantities to experiment with it on my own, it effectively doesn't exist.
It also makes me very skeptical that you are wont to correct me about "there are visible light curing resins"... yet their own media material shows clear bottles holding the resin. I would expect a nice semi-hard cylinder of somewhat cured resin if that's what they are using. My guess is they are using a FormLabs, printing the pieces, and then putting 'liquid' in the clear bottle.
Something doesn't add up here. I'm surmising a scam.
Edit 2:
Really now? I highlight a problem with the physics of what they are showing, and downvotes? How about a discussion rather than silent disapproval?
Perhaps not coincidentally, these resins seem to be sold in less photogenic opaque black bottles, but this does make it more likely that a resin actually exists.
The part of the article that bothered me more was the explanation of the principle of operation:
At the bottom of the reservoir, there’s a piece of polarized glass which you place your phone underneath, facing upward.
The polarized glass then takes all this light (which shines outwardly to give your phone a wider viewing angle) and redirects it so that all the photons are traveling straight upward.
I don't think that's how polarizing filters work. But perhaps this is just an issue with the 3rd party reporting rather than with the product itself.
