As much as I love the 3D printing revolution, I feel like we all collectively skipped a step - most parents and teachers I know would just be ecstatic to have a 2D cutter plotter for the purposes of cutting out silhouettes of letters and the like.
Both that and the somewhat cheaper cricut are into the whole walled garden thing where you get to buy the letter "H" for $1 or whatever.
Its not like owning a laserprinter where you can reasonably assume you can "just print" without having to purchase each letter in each font first.
Also my wife has a cricut and its slow. Fast enough for home craft use, but don't expect 15 ppm laser printer speeds, its more like 5 to maybe 10 minutes per page. This has scaling effect and labor cost issues for a school teacher. Theoretically you could build something as fast as a modern laser cutter, heck, you could use a modern laser cutter, but even those aren't as fast as a laser printer.
Giving the kids some fine motor practice in cutting out laserprinted outlines would be cheaper and more effective.
> Both that and the somewhat cheaper cricut are into the whole walled garden thing where you get to buy the letter "H" for $1 or whatever.
Both the product FAQ and the customer comments on that page disagree with you:
Q: Can you create your own illustrations / decal designs (vectors) and print them with
this - or is it only clip-art images?
A: Yes, I create my own vector designs and import them from adobe illustrator.
My only alibi is no one in my wife's scrapbooking clique could handle creating their own dxfs or pirating any kind of files off the internet, making me correct in practice. There surely do exist at least some scrappers who have CAD skills. Just not many of them.
When circut was new the carts I bought my wife for gifts were all like $60 and have steadily dropped in price over the years. Now they're mostly like $20. When diecuts at the local scrapbook store are only $1 or even 50 cents a cartridge is a luxury but not really economic, but at $20 its hard to justify buying diecuts instead of a cartridge.
Is a ripoff a good deal if the alternative is technologically impossible for most and the ripoff is really cheap? A good analogy is a buck for a two minute .mp3 top 40 song, I don't think its worth a buck, but its more convenient than filesharing or ripping, especially for people technologically incapable of it, and its not a lot of money so, ok fine whatever, even if I'm not smiling while I pay my $1.
