A team of physicists and engineers at the University of Strathclyde, in Scotland, working with a colleague from the University of Glasgow, has developed the means for 3D printing a microscope, including the lens, for under $60. In their paper posted on the bioRxiv preprint server, the group describes how they came up with the plans for the microscope and notes that the end result has a resolution strong enough to make out individual blood cells in test samples.
One gets the impression the printer necessary for a lens eats the cost difference.
You can buy one printer and make a labs worth of microscopes for a school or business.
The paper mentions 2 printers and quite a few other pieces of equipment for clearing the lenses, which is kinda what I figured the catch was going to be.
Edit: what I could see coming from that is this new manufacturing method bringing costs down across the board, and they’ll almost certainly be individuals that go all the way through with it as it’s described here, along with making improvements along the way. I just think the headline is inviting disappointment.
As 3D printers become increasingly commonplace, I have noticed various ways of accessing a 3D printer without having to own one — my local library has one nowadays
Mine does too but I don’t even think it could do something clear, nonetheless a lens of any type. I think we’ll see some amount of time pass before that sort of machine is readily available to the public in that context and time after that before enough people get handy enough with the maintenance for precision work like that.