3·
13 hours agoThe latter. Think an inkjet printer with uv-curable ink, and instead of paper it prints on anything you can put on its bed. They come with white ink, and usually varnish. You can make some relief with more quantity/layers of white and/or varnish. In industrial/professional shops is rare to see these ‘3d’ (also referred as 2.5d) effects, I only know one that prints high-end-ish pieces (for a big markup I guess) and one that specializes in prints for blind people so they use it for putting braille in lots of things, mainly for the time it takes (and I’m talking about professional machines) so most people do flat prints that are also pretty cool.
The tech very much has existed for a few years now, but not on a home setting. I don’t know about this product because as you said there’s very little info, but as professional and industrial uv printers go the consumables would be the uv-curable ink (which is some nasty shit) and the parts that get in contact with it–printheads, caps, wipers, dampers, filters, pumps… not every printer has all of these but all will have some way of delivering the ink to and to clean the printhead(s). They have white and usually varnish inks, and they chug these two while the colour layer is similar to that of a regular inkjet printer. They also waste ink on the cleaning (that you’ll do a lot) and this one seem to include a tank or cartridge for fluid for auto-flushing. Also electric and electronic components degrade and fail as well. None of those come cheap, uv lamps are pretty pricy too but last long (I don’t know about this one, it seems pretty small. The ones I’ve seen are more robust with radiators and fans, the cheapest of which costs more by itself than this whole machine) if you take care of them.