Not "Into it", but did look into it for manufacturing purposes. You first need to decide what you need it for, materials, size, accuracy, speed etc and then you can narrow down from there. Prices go from the hundred to thousand dollar range to several hundred thousand dollar range based on the a fore mentioned criteria.

~Matt

I have one...and I bought to small. I wanted to do bike parts and mine is to small for what I want. Print area is key....and dual filament is nice.

My 7 year old makes lots of fun stuff with tinkercad.

My sister bought a maker-bot and it has been trouble free. Mine is open source so it was about a 6 hour ordeal to make it all work.

Have fun

this technology is evolving fast - investigate any local printers you can use - design at home and pay-to-print

This if possible. We have 2 printers in our lab and both are a headache. We have a Makerbot model just after they were sold and we have finally got it to place where it is relatively stable. Knock on wood.
Do NOT under any circumstances buy anything from 3DSystems. Complete shyte.

his technology is evolving fast - investigate any local printers you can use - design at home and pay-to-print

For the home user, unless you're really just into the novelty, this is the way to go. There are sites on the web where you can upload your design and they will print them for you cheap as cheap can be. They do this by stacking up, jigsaw puzzle style, as many different parts as will fit into their printing cube. They do it with better material on better machines and you get a much better product for a fraction of the cost.

We have a place locally that is essentially government supported that also does it very inexpensively and has several very high end machines. This is one of the main reasons we decided to not get into it at all. We'd either have to create an infrastruture like that of the Web sites or have to compete head to head with people that are essentially working off of government grants and support...which wasn't going to happen. Instead, when we need something printed out, we take it to them and suck off the government teat as well :-)

~Matt

thanks for the tips - any advice on what software to use as a newbie?