i.Materialise Offers Black Steel 3D Prints and Lowers Pricing

Popular consumer-oriented 3D print service i.Materialise just added a very interesting new material: Black Steel. 

The new material offers a really unique look. It’s not jet black, of course, but is a very dark grey, reminiscent of the steel you’d see on the side of a warship, for example. In fact, that might be an interesting item to print in this material. 

The Black Steel joins a set of other steel finishes already provided by i.Materialise: Natural, Gold Plated, and Brown. Most are offered in either polished or unpolished versions. We prefer the polished surfaces, but depending on your application you might want the rougher unpolished finish. 

There’s one other change to i.Materialise’s Steel offer: the prices have dropped by an average of 16%. No, they don’t specify an exact amount as the price of any particular item is determined by a complex series of factors related to the efficiency of printing. For example, you can get a proportional discount if you manage to squeeze more material in the bounding box for your model. 

However, the best thing to do would be to upload your 3D model to i.Materialise and check out the calculated price. You can select different steel finishes to see how the price varies. Of course, you’ll find the gold-plated version the most expensive! 

Via i.Materialise