Are consumer level 3D printers able to print plastic objects of similar quality to ones produced using injection molding? Or is 3D printing useful mostly for the prototyping stage before a design is finalized and a steel mold is produced for injection molding?
There's no data on those, but we did at some point print air tight (0.8 bar over a week iirc, no vapour smoothing) in abs, so it may be similar. Consumer grade hardware of this sort is probably still pretty far away, but it's not as impossible as many believe :)a